againstwage

[Devrim]

This is an e-mail we got from an Iranian group. There seems like a lot of stuff about strikes here, so I put it in this forum
Please find our recently updated website with several new articles.
Many of these articles highlight current working struggles around the world. Among these articles include updates from:
· the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane workers strike and solidarity-building in Iran which is currently continuing
· the South African Transport Union's refusal to unload weapons for Zimbabwe highlights the alignment of the union with a particular sector of the bourgeoisie
· a recent Nurse's strike in Sweden which ended after 40 days due to the interference by their union
· an oil workers strike in Trinidad for safer working conditions
· Vietnamese Shoe workers striking for higher pay in a situation of high inflation and rising food costs
· the self-management of a bike factory in Germany which lasted for 115 days
· the German employer's association suing the government in order to reduce the Social Security for the people
· a Toronto Transit Commission strike rejecting a recent union-negotiated deal with management
· the development of a Worker's Council in Norway outside of the Trade Union model
· Egyptian and Swazi Textile workers striking for better pay in order to survive the increasing inflation
· World Cup 2010 construction workers striking for better pay in South Africa
· Hyundai wildcat strike in Korea
· Update to the imprisonment of worker-activist Mahmoud Salehi in Iran
· Strike by millions of workers in Greece
· And the failed Iraq war, a brutal example of the American bourgeois's role in the struggle between global capitalist poles
The main thread linking all of these articles demonstrates the amount of worker struggles around the world and with unionism these struggles cannot succeed and even with the history of unionism demonstrates the same. Workers must flex their might with their own power – to demonstrate this it can happen with factory take-overs, self-management of the workplaces. There is the absolute and utter uselessness of Trade Unions to play a role in a true worker's movement; they are not anti-capitalist nor will unions ever be. It must be understood that these current worker struggles are fights against the symptoms of the issues and must not be exclusively this; that the workers must engage themselves to understand the cause of the illness of our society and fight against the cause in order to change the social relation to production. The constant withdrawal and deterioration of the situation of the workers must end. Therefore the fight must not include only immediate demands but also embrace a struggle outside of the current union model against the bosses which is the fight against and ultimate abolish the wages system.

www.againstwage.com (http://www.againstwage.com/)


Devrim

[Bilan]

I got this email too...

[Devrim]

What do you think of them?

Devrim

[Die Neue Zeit]

Ideological childishness, I'm afraid :(


The main thread linking all of these articles demonstrates the amount of worker struggles around the world and with unionism these struggles cannot succeed and even with the history of unionism demonstrates the same.

Really? :rolleyes:


Workers must flex their might with their own power – to demonstrate this it can happen with factory take-overs, self-management of the workplaces.

That is valid.


There is the absolute and utter uselessness of Trade Unions

Typical of left-communist reductionism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/left-communist-ultra-t76114/index.html)... :(


they are not anti-capitalist nor will unions ever be

Yes, because RED unions (hopefully they emerge in the future) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1163112&postcount=8) are not so, either. :rolleyes:


I can only speak for the USA. Given the shrinkage of the yellow AFL-CIO unions to only 11 or 12 percent of the workforce, I wonder whether a revival of organizing by the existing red union, the syndicalist IWW, might not be an appropriate structure for revolutionaries to work within. Why re-invent the wheel indeed. Does the "one big union" leading to the "general strike" concept prefigure the way things would actually go? Probably not and I am not here to argue that. More modestly, I would point out that there is an existing structure of self-proclaimed red hue whose minimal standard for membership (no, I don't exploit labor, yes, I agree that the working class and the capitalist class have nothing in common, yes, I will practice solidarity toward other workers) allows Marxists and mature anarchists a framework for common class-based efforts. Obviously, I'm not talking about organizing Starbucks or other "left culture ghettos" which is mostly what goes on inside the IWW currently. However, a huge change is on the horizon in the USA with the coming card-check collective bargaining reform (assuming that the drive toward war with Iran doesn't sidetrack all the little reforms we can be making use of). Again I apologize for the USA-centric slant of my remarks; uniquely in the advanced world, we here lack a mass reformist "socialist" or "labor" party (whatever their betrayals, they at least equipped workers with a vocabulary for conceptualizing their situation); most left work here has been one or another variety of entryism in the yellow unions. Now, however, the yellow unions themselves are fading in importance, both as instruments of self defence for our class' minimum needs and as instruments for conveying ruling class ideas into the proletariat (media do more of that than anything else these days). Naked class rule is increasingly the order of the day; syndicalist approaches are comprehensible to masses of workers within the USA context.





Notwithstanding the excellent remarks above by Comrade hekmatista, I suppose you guys have the same reductionist opinion towards union globalization? :(

Besides, the same "anti-capitalist" remark applies to reforms in general, or are you gonna resort to that reductionist ICC "analysis" of decadence? :rolleyes:


One which divides the history of capitalism into two big epochs: of ascendance and decadence. Almost everything that was valid for communists during the first epoch is no longer valid in the second, for the simple fact that there is no more growth and only decadence. An example? The trades unions: before decadence they were okay and it was correct for revolutionaries to work there to take over the leadership, afterwards this is no longer valid. And that’s that. Not even a passing reference to the historical and institutional role of the unions as mediators; much less to the relationship between this role and the various phases of capitalism, or rather of the objective relationship between profit rates and bargaining space.




Therefore the fight must not include only immediate demands but also embrace a struggle outside of the current union model against the bosses which is the fight against and ultimate abolish the wages system.

Unfortunately, left-communists aren't exactly well-known for embracing minimum (constitutional-democratic, labourist, welfarist) and reformist (transitional, democratic-socialist) demands, are they? :rolleyes:

"What old and familiar rubbish! What ’Left-wing’ childishness!" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/)

[black magick hustla]

Unfortunately, left-communists aren't exactly well-known for embracing minimum (constitutional-democratic, labourist, welfarist) and reformist (transitional, democratic-socialist) demands, are they?

Left communists always support workers protecting their standard of living. However, if we had "minimum demands" we might as well join the Democratic Socialists of America and the second international, shouldn't we? :lol:

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Since when did you join that reductionist and Sabbath-sectarian International Childish Current? :(

[And yes, because struggling for minimum demands means practicing deep entryism like what you're suggesting... :rolleyes: ]

[black magick hustla]

^^^ Since when did you join that reductionist and Sabbath-sectarian International Childish Current? :(

[And yes, because struggling for minimum demands means practicing deep entryism like what you're suggesting... :rolleyes: ]


I didn't join it.


However


Unfortunately, left-communists aren't exactly well-known for embracing minimum (constitutional-democratic, labourist, welfarist) and reformist (transitional, democratic-socialist) demands, are they?

The word "embrace" suggest that we should include it in our platform. That is not a communist platform, that is a social democratic platform. If I were going to "embrace" a platform like that I might as well join the Mexican PRD. There is no point of having an organization that claims to be "communist" but acts like the local Democratic Socialist Party.

Regardless, Left communists have always supported workers standing to protect standards of living. Just a quick glance at the ICC webpage and you will see articles on a myriad of actions, including strikes against the slashing of gains.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So what have you got to say about the minimum demands outlined specifically in the Manifesto (although methinks that work is crap compared to other works by Marx and Engels)?



Program of a New Type: Dynamic Minimum-Reformist-Revolutionary (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1152754&postcount=10)

[black magick hustla]

The manifesto's demands are post-revolutionary, i.e. they are placed down after the overthrow of the bourgeosie and when the proletariat wrests political power, so your point is null.

Hence
course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property

[Leo]

The main thread linking all of these articles demonstrates the amount of worker struggles around the world and with unionism these struggles cannot succeed and even with the history of unionism demonstrates the same.Really? :rolleyes:Saying "OH REALLY???" doesn't refute arguements, Jacob.


factory take-overs, self-management of the workplaces.This actually is not a left communist position at all.


Yes, because RED unions (hopefully they emerge in the future) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1163112&postcount=8) are not so, either.I guess you are the only fella from whom one can hear about outdated and disproved nonsense such as "Red Unions".

To help you catch up, "Red Unions" existed in the past, both in centralized revolutionary (such as the IWW in America, KAPD's Unionen in Germany, Red Unions in the Balkans and Anatolia etc.) and anarcho-syndicalist forms (the Spanish CNT, and the French CGT, among with some Italian anarchist unions). It was, although exciting, proven to be a devastating tactic. Even when the Red Unions were functioning, and such organs can only exist and function as unions in periods of massive class confrontations, they were not effective in the way they wanted to be: they fundamentally resulted in separating the most militant and struggling sections of the working class from the rest of the proletariat, and isolating them. Accordingly, with the weakening of the international proletariat (whose strength is not in any way connected to "Red Unions"), those organizations either slided into the camp of the bourgeoisie in fear of losing their strength and influence and thus betrayed, or were weak enough to be destroyed by the ruling class.

It was a valuable experience of course, above all in showing why the appropriate workers organizations in revolutionary periods in the decadent epoch of capitalism was workers' councils rather than "Red Union" type organizations.

Of course history repeats itself twice, once as a tragedy and once as a farce, so it is necessary to give the example of Red Unions today after mentioning the tragedy of the past. DISK (Revolutionary [or "Progressive" since they are ashamed to translate their name as revolutionary those days] Workers' Unions Confederation of Turkey) was founded claiming to be a "revolutionary" trade union, in the seventies in Turkey. Only a few years afterwards, there was a massive workers strike (150,000 workers took the streets of Istanbul), this trade union immediately called for the end of the strike and when the soldiers were beating, arresting, shooting workers they took the side of the army while telling the workers not to throw a single piece of rock at the "honorable" Turkish Armed Forces whom they called "their most precious treasure". Recently there was a scandal involving the recent head of that trade-union, building a five star hotel with the union money. Or if we look at the IWW, the last we heard of them was yet another scandal concerning them signing a "no-strike agreement" with the bosses in a workplace they organized in.


Oh, and I suppose you guys have the same reductionist opinion towards union globalization?Actually anyone who has ever talked to someone from a trade-union who knows what this "union globalization" thing would know that the whole issue is nothing but a farce. First of all what you are reffering to is probably things like ITUC, WTFU and ETUC and so forth. This is not a new thing at all. All those umbrella federations were basically a product of the imperialist rivalries between the USA and the USSR. Now with the fall of the Eastern Block, WTFU is losing it's significance, while ITUC-ETUC has obviously became more significant. Of course the whole thing is like the United Nations, or perhaps the Nato on the trade-union level, and all trade-unions remain being affiliated with the interests of the capital of their own countries.

There is little to be taken seriously in regards to that.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ I'm not referring to trade union federations at all:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/uk-unite-union-t79728/index.html

[Die Neue Zeit]

The manifesto's demands are post-revolutionary, i.e. they are placed down after the overthrow of the bourgeosie and when the proletariat wrests political power, so your point is null.

It seems that your position is worse than Trotsky's "transitional demands as revolutionary" position. :(

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm


Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:

(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.

(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.

(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.

(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.

(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.

(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.

(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.

I should note that the Manifesto demanded the abolition of child/children labour, so how is such a demand "post-revolutionary"? :rolleyes:


(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.

(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.

(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.

(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/multiple-merger-formulas-t77061/index.html


I can only speak for the USA. Given the shrinkage of the yellow AFL-CIO unions to only 11 or 12 percent of the workforce, I wonder whether a revival of organizing by the existing red union, the syndicalist IWW, might not be an appropriate structure for revolutionaries to work within. Why re-invent the wheel indeed. Does the "one big union" leading to the "general strike" concept prefigure the way things would actually go? Probably not and I am not here to argue that. More modestly, I would point out that there is an existing structure of self-proclaimed red hue whose minimal standard for membership (no, I don't exploit labor, yes, I agree that the working class and the capitalist class have nothing in common, yes, I will practice solidarity toward other workers) allows Marxists and mature anarchists a framework for common class-based efforts. Obviously, I'm not talking about organizing Starbucks or other "left culture ghettos" which is mostly what goes on inside the IWW currently. However, a huge change is on the horizon in the USA with the coming card-check collective bargaining reform (assuming that the drive toward war with Iran doesn't sidetrack all the little reforms we can be making use of). Again I apologize for the USA-centric slant of my remarks; uniquely in the advanced world, we here lack a mass reformist "socialist" or "labor" party (whatever their betrayals, they at least equipped workers with a vocabularly for conceptualizing their situation); most left work here has been one or another variety of entryism in the yellow unions. Now, however, the yellow unions themselves are fading in importance, both as instruments of self defence for our class' minimum needs and as instruments for conveying ruling class ideas into the proletariat (media do more of that than anything else these days). Naked class rule is increasingly the order of the day; syndicalist approaches are comprehensible to masses of workers within the USA context.

[Devrim]

Jacob of all the people who insult the communist left on these boards I think you are by far the most boring, and irrelevant. I say 'I think' as I am not certain as I rarely manage to read one of your post in its entirety.

If you want to have a general rant about the communist left, please go and do it on another thread, as I am actually interested in what people think about this group.

Devrim

[Leo]

“Such a bridging of the chasm between the nations, such an international amalgamation of great sections of the people of different lands, the history of the world has never seen before.” (Karl Kautsky)

What the old renegade's talking about there didn't end well now, did it?


In April 2007, the United Steelworkers entered into merger negotiations with what was then the United Kingdom’s second-largest trade union, Amicus. Shortly afterwards, Amicus merged with the Transport and General Workers’ Union to form UNITE. This new union then agreed to merge with the United Steelworkers and thus form the world’s first multinational trade union

Oh, so it is the merger of two small trade-unions from countries that speak the same language.

As for their mentality:


While big business is global and labour is national, we are going to be at a disadvantage ... We have a view that we need a global trade union in order to be able to deal effectively and on a par with the many global companies

It is clearly business-unionist. Nor does it, of course, mean an abandoning of any political connections with national capital.

And also, of course, I'd imagine their American and British branches still would have their autonomies, so it's difference from trade-union federations is on paper also.

[black magick hustla]

Lets make this clear.

First I am a left communist, then a marxist. I don't follow Marx verbatim because he was just another communist, not the father of communism.

Second, your point is still null. The passage from the principles of communism calls for an establishment of a democratic constitution by the proletariat itself. And for the proletariat to wrest political power there needs to be a revolution. No matter how "gradualist" the demands seem, Marx was already clear that in order for the proletariat to gain political power there needs to be a revolution.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Jacob of all the people who insult the communist left on these boards I think you are by far the most boring, and irrelevant. I say 'I think' as I am not certain as I rarely manage to read one of your post in its entirety.

1) I don't play sectarian games.
2) I'm not fond of polemic games on the level of Lenin's ( :( ).
3) I differentiate between ICC left-communists and other types (be they IBRP or those merely claiming to be "left-communists" because they don't like Trotskyism).
4) Maybe I'm not as good a communicator in normal-post form than I am in WIP-form ( :( ).


If you want to have a general rant about the communist left, please go and do it on another thread, as I am actually interested in what people think about this group.

I already stated my opinion above; a lot of their opinions are reductionist.


What the old renegade's talking about there didn't end well now, did it?

Yes, the man whom Cyril Smith attributed the origins of "Marxism" to (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith4.htm) was a "renegade" in 1892. :rolleyes:

I have actually read some of his works (which says a lot more about how many "revolutionaries" don't appreciate past revolutionary history by reading more).]

[black magick hustla]

The IBRP is more sectarian than the ICC I think. (Hence why probably the latter is much bigger)

[Die Neue Zeit]

Funny; I thought it was the reverse. :confused:

[KC]

The word "embrace" suggest that we should include it in our platform. That is not a communist platform, that is a social democratic platform. If I were going to "embrace" a platform like that I might as well join the Mexican PRD. There is no point of having an organization that claims to be "communist" but acts like the local Democratic Socialist Party.

Marmot, I think you'd be interested in Trotsky's Transitional Program (http://marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm) with regards to this issue.

[Devrim]

Marmot, I think you'd be interested in Trotsky's Transitional Program (http://marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm) with regards to this issue.

In that Trotskyists 'claim to be "communist" but act like the local Democratic Socialist Party'?

Devrim

[KC]

In that Trotskyists 'claim to be "communist" but act like the local Democratic Socialist Party'?

Vulgar "Marxism".

[Leo]

Perhaps you would also like to make an attempt to demonstrate where the vulgarity is here?

[KC]

I wasn't trying to say there was any here; I was trying to say that many groups misinterpret Trotsky's Transitional Program in a vulgar way, either used to justify reformism or to support a criticism of Trotsky himself as some kind of reformist.

A little while ago Richter posted an article by CPGB on the Transitional Program, for example, which was ridiculously and profoundly flawed in the way it interpreted the Program and therefore also its criticisms.

[Devrim]

A little while ago Richter posted an article by CPGB on the Transitional Program, for example, which was ridiculously and profoundly flawed in the way it interpreted the Program and therefore also its criticisms.

I think that there are many problems with the whole idea of the transitional programme, but I don't think the reading Jacob would help to find them.

I think that the roots of the idea of the transitional programme are in the defeat of the revolution, and the Trotskyists 'disappointment' that a new revolutionary period didn't emerge.

They didn't know what to do, and ended up in bed with the only people who would have them, the social democrats, the same people who the communists had broke with only a couple of decades earlier.

The transitional programme basically theorises the remarriage.

Devrim

[PRC-UTE]

I think that there are many problems with the whole idea of the transitional programme, but I don't think the reading Jacob would help to find them.

I think that the roots of the idea of the transitional programme are in the defeat of the revolution, and the Trotskyists 'disappointment' that a new revolutionary period didn't emerge.

They didn't know what to do, and ended up in bed with the only people who would have them, the social democrats, the same people who the communists had broke with only a couple of decades earlier.

The transitional programme basically theorises the remarriage.

Devrim

I read that article you or another comrade had provided that (very briefly) mentioned the Workers Opposition, but it was mostly about Trotsky and his tactics. It was an interesting read. I hadn't connected before that Trotskyist politics emerged from defeat and a misguided hope in a new revolutionary period, though it seems obvious now. I think they tend to be overly hopeful that revolution is about to happen, constantly announcing there's about to be a revolution even when there's no chance of one.

So is the Left Communist position that communists should continue to fight the class struggle, but not become entangled in the unions? I'd like to hear more about what your concrete policies are.

Sorry if this is OT.

[Joe Hill's Ghost]

Most transitional Program Trots I know tend to fall into this weird radical social democracy stance. Sooner rather than later they've forgotten the radical part and the social democracy has completely recuperated them. You can see it with most of the folks in the DSA, which is composed of many former revolutionaries.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I wasn't trying to say there was any here; I was trying to say that many groups misinterpret Trotsky's Transitional Program in a vulgar way, either used to justify reformism or to support a criticism of Trotsky himself as some kind of reformist.

A little while ago Richter posted an article by CPGB on the Transitional Program, for example, which was ridiculously and profoundly flawed in the way it interpreted the Program and therefore also its criticisms.

Actually, the exposure of the "hidden" notion of giving "revolutionary" coating to essentially real-reformist (as opposed to minimum-reformist) demands is quite good:

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/649/programme.htm

Programmatic masks and transitional fleas

Is Leon Trotsky’s Transitional programme the last word when it comes to the Marxist programme? Or does it represent regression in Marxist terms? Jack Conrad argues against Trotskyite economism

Most comrades on the left that I come across - sadly including those whom I hold in some esteem: rank and file cadre always, thinkers often, members of national councils, central committees and political committees occasionally - take it as axiomatic that they must reject out of hand, almost as a sacred duty, the programme of classical Marxism: ie, the minimum-maximum programmes produced, most significantly, first by the German Social Democratic Party, and then by the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (the subject of a future article).

But these comrades feel compelled to do more. Instinctually. Almost as a Pavlovian reflex. They attack the programmes of classical Marxism, and thereby, if only by inference, the Draft programme of the CPGB, as if they were historically anointed Van Helsings, tasked with ridding the workers’ movement of the curse of the minimum-maximum programme.

Supposedly the minimum-maximum programme inevitably led to that fateful vote for war credits by the SDP Reichstag fraction in August 1914; and, though it is dwarfed by that act of treachery, the same minimum-maximum structure is blamed for the creeping revolutionary defencism of the Kamenev-Stalin leadership of the Petrograd-Moscow Bolsheviks in 1917 - swiftly cut short by Lenin’s ‘modifications’ to the programme after his return from exile (once again, a subject to which we shall return).

Ironically, the comrades truly seem to believe that they are equipped with the leftwing equivalent of silver bullets, wooden stakes, cloves of garlic, holy water, the christian cross and sacred Latin mumbo jumbo culled from the Vulgate Bible: in short, I am afraid to say, Leon Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme - otherwise known as The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International. The comrades certainly display all the gullibility of Bram Stoker’s fictional vampire hunters.

Note, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Trotskyism, certainly in Britain, has become the common sense of the left - but in a form I doubt Trotsky would himself recognise. Indeed, I expect Lev Davidovich would be mortified. Having sown dragons’ teeth, including in his Transitional programme, the fact of the matter is that we are today plagued with right opportunist fleas, most claiming to be Trotsky’s legitimate heirs and successors.

Apart from the tiniest sects - organisations which are in truth closer to Bakunin’s anarchism than Marxism, such as Workers Power, the Spartacist League, International Bolshevik Tendency, etc - the vast bulk of Trotskyite comrades typically operate according to, construct or defend programmatic positions far to the right of the Transitional programme... and yet, when challenged, they indignantly claim justification by invoking the Transitional programme.

Some typical examples.

In October 2004 John Rees saw to it that the Socialist Workers Party bloc vote was used to defeat a CPGB motion that would have committed Respect to proletarian socialism: “a socialist society where the working class is the ruling class”.1 His comrades tried to do something not dissimilar with Solidarity in Scotland this month. The SWP wanted the Tommy Sheridan fan club to become a Respect copycat: ie, explicitly not socialist … but apart from themselves they found no takers.

The International Socialist Group is the British affiliate to the so-called Fourth International. And yet the comrades have fully cooperated with the SWP’s project of constructing a non-socialist mask behind which to hide their unappealing faces. Alan Thornett, the ISG’s leader, was the main architect of Respect’s hopelessly eclectic left populist 2005 general election manifesto. Unfulfillable Keynesian promises mixed with vague anti-capitalist statements, all designed to fudge the difference between socialism and political islam. Subsequently, to his eternal shame, comrade Rees was responsible for further watering down this thinnest of thin social gruel at the insistence of George Galloway. Though Thornett’s manifesto had been agreed by Respect’s national council, missing from the final version, the one that actually circulated to electors, was the elementary commitment to homosexual equality. And, due to the same fear of offending islamic fundamentalist sensibilities, a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, had been sneakily clipped back to a “woman’s right to choose” … to choose what? To wear the veil?

The Socialist Party in England and Wales tries to give itself leftist street credibility nowadays. It talks of socialism. The target is unspoken but clear - Respect. But scratch the surface of SPEW’s socialism and what you find revealed is a version of old Labourism: national, reformist and bureaucratic. Indeed, within its Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, SPEW does exactly what the SWP does in Respect. At its founding conference on March 19, it used its block vote to reject Marxism. It wants to hide behind the mask of Keir Hardie.

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty comes from the same political mould. Revealingly, the 1945 Attlee government has been described as a “workers’ government”. Given its social imperialism, the AWL even refuses to call for the immediate withdrawal of US-UK occupation forces from Iraq. In the 2005 general election the AWL aligned itself with SPEW and the Alliance for Green Socialism - a right-moving, left reformist outfit - elsewhere it loyally voted Labour, including for the pro-Iraq-invasion Oona King in Bethnal Green, against the anti-invasion rebel, George Galloway.

When combined together into the short-lived Socialist Alliance of England and Wales, it was the four groups mentioned above - SWP, ISG, SPEW and AWL - who were primarily responsible for straitjacketing its 2001 general election manifesto, People before profit. While it contains a few bright spots and moments, the overall framework is Labourite. The majority in the Socialist Alliance were committed to fashioning the organisation into a machine for capturing Labourites as Labourites. Needless to say, it did not work.

Unsurprisingly, the fragmented Trotskyite groups in the Labour Party are even more overtly Labourite. Their handiwork can be seen in the Labour Representation Committee, the John for Leader campaign and in the pages of Labour Left Briefing and other such publications. Our Trotskyites guiltily hide away their ‘Marxism’ and compete with each other in concocting ways to revive Labourism.

Hence what their victory over Stalinism resolves itself into in the realm of programme is the reproduction of the old ‘official communist’ British road to socialism programme. But at a far less coherent level. Another case of ‘First time tragedy, second time farce’.

After all, the various versions of the BRS - produced between 1950 and 1978 - were premised on the claim that the international balance of forces was decisively shifting in favour of ‘socialism’: ie, away from the imperialist countries and in favour of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, China, etc. In 1961 Nikita Khrushchev predicted with all the confidence of the technocratic buffoon that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States by 1970 and then build the material and technical basis of communism: “Thus a communist society will in the main be built in the USSR” - by 1980! Obviously nothing to do with authentic socialism or communism. Absurd in retrospect … and something we sought to systematically disprove.4 It did not seem that way to many at the time, however, including wide swathes of the Labour and trade union left.

Hugh Scanlon and Tony Benn, Jack Jones and Michael Foot were not in the ‘official’ CPGB. Nonetheless, they effectively adhered to and followed the ‘official’ CPGB programme. Claims about the tilting balance of class forces served to explain why socialism would, or at least could, come via the Labour Party, state capitalist nationalisation and defence of the British nation-state.

The programmes of Respect, the CNWP, Solidarity and the Scottish Socialist Party might differ with the John for Leader campaign and the Labour Representation Committee over the nature of the Labour Party - crucially the likelihood of ‘reclaiming’ it, as if at some time in the past it served as a vehicle for working class self-liberation. Nevertheless, when it comes down to it, all are agreed that the main task of ‘Marxists’ is to exchange tarnished New Labour for one or another version of the old.

Given the small size of the groups concerned and their shallow roots in the working class, what they actually produce often amounts to less than the sum of their parts: that is, hollow and insubstantial ‘united fronts’, which do not unite the vanguard with the broad masses of the working class - that would be a real united front. Rather what we get is this or that Trotskyite sect united with loose and largely phantom elements to their right. From nothing to nothing.

With what justification? Not the international balance of class forces. That’s for sure. These comrades find justification in Trotsky’s Transitional programme … sadly a claim not without foundation.

Productive forces

In the late 1930s Trotsky became firmly convinced that capitalism was more than just decadent and moribund. Capitalism faced immediate extinction, was experiencing its writhing “death agony”. As a system it could no longer develop the productive forces - an idea he took, of course, from Marx’s well known ‘Preface’ to A contribution to the critique of political economy (1859): “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins the period of social revolution”.

Though Marx’s ‘Preface’ is flawed in some important respects and goes against the grain of what he wrote elsewhere - it can, after all, be read to mean that the material productive forces, not the class struggle, are the locomotive of history - such an assessment coming from Trotsky, that capitalism had turned into an absolute fetter, was perfectly understandable, given the circumstances of the time.

Before him Vladimir Lenin and Rudolf Hilferding had already laid the foundations by writing penetrating studies of finance capital and the “last stage of capitalism”. It was not only the left that saw capitalism as being in decline. Bourgeois intellectuals often despaired of further progress under their own system. Pessimism was rife. Eg, the German historian, Oswald Spengler - conservative, Nietzschean and anti-democratic - authored the influential The decline of the west (1918-22). By way of analogy he argued that capitalism had entered its last winter. The soul of western civilisation was dead. The age of caesarism had begun. A theme taken up in Britain by Arnold Toynbee (A study of history 1934-61).

The 1929 Wall Street crash, the global slump, the forced abandonment of the gold standard, soaring unemployment, the coming to power of Nazi gangsters in 1933 and the fragmentation of the world economy into rival, antagonistic zones conveyed an ever mounting sense of pending doom. Humanity was living at the end of times. For Trotsky, capitalism was disintegrating. Spain, Abyssinia, China were for him but heralds of a general conflagration. Not even the large-scale introduction of new consumer goods, means of transport and technologies, such as vacuum cleaners, telephones, cars, aeroplanes and electronics, reversed the chronic malaise: “Mankind’s productive forces stagnate”. All that got Germany, USA, Japan, Britain, Italy and France - the main capitalist powers - moving economically in the late 1930s, putting the unemployed back to work, was preparation for the slaughter of another world war. Fifty million were to die.

Conditions for socialism, said Trotsky, were not only ripe, but overripe. Without a global socialist revolution all the gains of civilisation were in danger. The main problem being not so much the consciousness of the masses. Rather the opportunism and cowardice of the ‘official’ communists and social democrats: “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership”. But, whereas the parties of ‘official communism’ and social democracy each counted their ranks in the tens and hundreds of thousands, even the millions, Trotsky’s forces were in comparative terms isolated, untrained and miniscule. Perhaps a couple of thousand worldwide. A problem Trotsky solved, at least in his mind, by falling back on what Marxists call ‘spontaneity’.

What he lacked in terms of organised forces in the real world he made up for with a programmatic reliance on the unconscious, the untheorised movement of the working class around everyday issues, such as pay and conditions. Desperate hope substitutes for harsh reality. The nature of the epoch “permits” revolutionaries to carry out economic struggles in a way that is “indissolubly” linked with the “actual tasks of the revolution”.

The “existing consciousness” of workers is not only the point of departure; it is now to all intents and purposes regarded as unproblematic. In the mind, subject and object are blurred one into the other. Though in ‘normal times’ most are not subjectively revolutionary - ie, educated in Marxism - workers are objectively revolutionary because of the reality of capitalism. But in the ‘new times’ no longer was it necessary through education and organisation to win the masses to consciously grasp the need to “change forthwith the old conditions”. Fighting to maintain existing conditions was all that was needed to “win the prize”. The constant tussle over wages and hours, putting in place safeguards against the corrosive effects of inflation and state-funded job creation were painted in revolutionary colours. A classic case of elevating trade union struggles to the level of socialist politics.

Trotsky reasoned that in general there can, in the epoch of “decaying capitalism”, be no systematic social reforms or raising of the masses’ living standards. Objective circumstances therefore propelled the masses, or so Trotsky believed, to overthrow capitalism, simply because every time the system conceded one spoonful it was forced to take back two. It was in an advanced state of decay. Therefore, he concluded, simple defence of existing economic gains through demanding a “sliding scale” of wages and hours, etc, would provide the initial trigger needed to launch the final, apocalyptic collision with capitalism.

Frankly, it does not surprise me in the least to read Trotsky’s sympathetic biographer, Isaac Deutscher, characterising the Transitional programme as “not so much a statement of principles as an instruction on tactics, designed for a party up to its ears in trade union struggles and day-to-day politics and striving to gain practical leadership immediately”. The Transitional programme is certainly marred with all manner of ephemeral facts, figures and personalities. It reads more like an antiquated manual for American SWP trade union activists, than a programme for Marxist tribunes of the people.

Trotsky insisted that if the defensive movement of the working class was energetically promoted, freed from bureaucratic constraints, and after that nudged in the direction of forming picket line defence guards, then pushed towards demanding nationalisation of key industries, it would, little leap following little leap, take at least a minority of the class towards forming soviets and then, to cap it all, the conquest of state power. Or, as Trotsky put it almost religiously, they would “storm not only heaven, but earth”.

Winning over the majority intellectually and organising the workers into a political party was dismissed as the gradualism that belonged to a previous, long dead, era: the era of competitive capitalism. Now, in the era of final collapse, the meagre, squat but semi-militarised forces of Trotskyism will lead the masses as if by stealth, steer them in their elemental movement towards a series of preset transitional demands which, taken together, are meant to serve as a system of directional arrows or a kind of ascending stairway.

After five years, or maybe 10, they might flock to join the Fourth International in their millions. Winning state power and ending capitalism internationally will, though, be revealed to them as the real aim only during the course of the rising spiral of struggle. Not quite, but almost, socialism as conspiracy. In essence, Trotsky, from a position of extreme organisational weakness, had re-invented the Blanquist putsch or the anarchist general strike ‘road to socialism’. This time the Trotskyites would be the educative elite, the tightly knit, highly disciplined, minority, operating as the command centre. They would drive the entire juggernaut of world revolution through their cogs and wheels of transitional demands, using trade union and other such levers.

In explaining his programme of transitional demands Trotsky takes to task the minimum-maximum programmes of “classical” social democracy. But Trotsky warned his band of followers that it would be a terrible mistake to “discard” the programme of old “minimal” demands, “to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness”. Trotsky was therefore prepared to defend existing democratic “rights and social conquests”. He did not, however, view them as having any particular purchase in and of themselves. No place, then, for high politics, demands for a democratic republic and extreme democracy, in the Transitional programme.

True, in fascist countries such as Germany and Italy, Trotsky conceded that his Fourth International would uphold “democratic slogans” in order to mobilise the masses. However, once the movement assumes something resembling a mass character then democratic demands (press freedom, the right to form independent trade unions) will be “intertwined” with “transitional ones”.

In effect Trotsky combined ‘Bolshevik-Leninist’ elitism with an apocalyptic version of economism: ie, the workers would, through strikes and other such elementary struggles, discover the “bridge” to the seizure of power.

Conclusion

No matter how we excuse Trotsky in terms of how things appeared on the eve of World War II, there is no escaping from the fact that he was wrong in method and periodisation. Trade union struggles are not hegemonic; they tend towards sectionalism, they do not lead to socialist consciousness. Nor was the 1930s capitalist slump permanent.

Suffice to say, after World War II capitalism experienced its highest and longest boom. By organising a further deformation of, or retreat from, the law of value with Keynesian welfarism, nationalisation and the cold war arms economy, conditions were laid for the American century and a sustained and unprecedented spasm of capital accumulation. More than that, especially in western Europe, reformism - both of the Labourite and ‘official communist’ variety - was given a new lease of life. Hence, instead of the tactics of insurrection and frontal assault being the order of the day, patient propaganda, deep organisation and the long war of manoeuvre surely fitted the bill.

The problem was, however, that Trotsky’s epigones either refused to acknowledge the capitalist boom of the 1950s and 60s or, when they finally admitted the truth that Trotsky’s 1938 prognosis no longer applied, they dogmatically stuck to what they Talmudically like to call the transitional method. In practice that amounts to sprinkling routine trade union struggles, left Labourism, black civil rights, the feminist movement and pacifistic anti-war protests with socialistic fairy dust. The magic never works. Trade unionism doggedly remains trade unionism, etc. However, the magician manages to change something.

The transitional method amounts to recruiting subjective revolutionaries and turning them into routine trade unionists, left Labourites, black separatists, feminists and pacifists. Thus the CNWP, the LRC, Respect and the rainbow coalition campaigns are not aberrations. The are the logical outcome of the much vaunted transitional method.

[Devrim]

So is the Left Communist position that communists should continue to fight the class struggle, but not become entangled in the unions? I'd like to hear more about what your concrete policies are.

This link may give you some idea of our perspectives. It is a series of articles relating to one strike.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/eks-t-rk-t81120/index.html


Sorry if this is OT.

Don't worry. I think that the entire thread was.

Devrim

[Floyce White]

I keep up with the literature from that group. Against Wage is always in favor of rank-and-file organizing. I've talked with them, and they're open to discussion about unions. If you have specific disagreement or a different point of view, why not address it to them?