Chapter 2: Reform coalition or mass strike?

  1. Q
    Q
    Let the discussion on chapter 2 begin:
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]2 Reform coalition or mass strike?[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In chapter one I discussed the idea that Marxism itself is a strategy - for the emancipation of the working class, through collective action for communism; and for the emancipation of “all human beings without distinction of sex or race” - ie, for communism - through the emancipation of the working class. I drew out some corollaries of this strategic concept: on the one hand, rejection of dependence on the existing state, and, on the other, the need for the working class to organise and act internationally before the arrival of ‘the revolution’ or the socialist millennium.[/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]I also discussed the choice made by the socialists of, first, the German SPD and, later, the Second International to prioritise the unity of the movement above all else. I concluded that the diplomatic formulation of the Gotha programme and the general principle of unity at all costs had not succeeded in suppressing strategic debate, and the core of the ‘problem of strategy’ began to be addressed in the debates between the right wing of the movement, the Kautskyan centre, and the leftist advocates of a ‘strategy of the general strike’.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]These tendencies drew on debates which had already begun. The ‘general strike strategy’ was a variant form of positions which had already been argued by the Bakuninists in the 1870s and were still maintained by anarcho-syndicalists.29 The policy of the right had indirect roots in the Lassalleans’ policy of demanding that the German imperial state support the workers against the capitalists; its more immediate root was the (successful) coalition policy of SPD regional leaders in southern Germany, which Engels criticised in The peasant question in France and Germany (1894).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The Kautskyan ‘centre’ position took its starting point from Marx and Engels’ polemics both against the anarchists at the time of the split in the First International, and against the coalitionism of the precursors of the right. But, though Kautsky (with a bit of arm-twisting from Engels30) had published Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme, he had by no means internalised Marx and Engels’ criticisms of that programme. Kautsky’s first draft of the 1891 Erfurt programme was subject to some similar criticisms from Engels,31 and, in the German and international centre tendency, Kautsky was allied both with the true author of the Gotha programme, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and with open Lassalleans like Mehring.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The right: reform v ‘utopianism’[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The underlying common idea of the right wing of the movement was that the practical task of the movement was to fight for reforms in the interests of the working class. In order to win these reforms, it was necessary to make coalitions with other tendencies which were willing to ally with the workers’ movement. And in order to make coalitions, it was necessary in the first place to be willing to take governmental office: it was by creating a coalition government that the possibility really arose of legislating in the interests of the working class, as well as of administrative measures (creating social security systems, etc).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Secondly, it was necessary to be willing to make substantial political compromises. Thus Engels, in The peasant question, polemicised against Vollmar’s programmatic concessions to the peasantry in relation to positive subsidies for family farming and in relation to trade union issues affecting agricultural labourers employed by small farmers.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The largest compromise - but, from the point of view of the right, the smallest - would be for the workers’ party to abandon its illusory and futile revolutionism; and, with it, equally illusory Marxist claims about crisis, and the notion that in an economic downswing reforms, as concessions made to the working class, would tend to be taken back unless the working class took political power into its own hands.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In the view of the right, the revolutionism was, after all, already empty of content. The German party, for example, did not call openly for the replacement of the monarchy by a republic and, though the Erfurt programme contained a good set of standard democratic-republican demands (for example, universal military training, popular militia, election of officials, including judges, and so on),32 these played only a marginal role in the party’s agitational and propaganda work.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The claim that economic downswing would produce attacks on concessions already made could perfectly well be conceded by rightists as true of the bourgeoisie; but the argument that this was also true of the state depended on the claim that the state was a class instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and was thus intertwined with revolutionism.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The right did not simply argue that getting rid of revolutionism would make the workers’ party into a respectable party with which other parties could do business, and which could therefore achieve coalitions, and hence concessions. It also offered a variety of theoretical objections to Marx and Engels’ arguments, based on christianity, Kantianism, nationalism and early appropriations of the marginalist economists’ critiques of Marx. A relatively sophisticated version was Bernstein’s Evolutionary socialism, which argued that the scientific approach of Marx and Engels was diverted by their residual Hegelianism into a utopian revolutionism.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The actual content of the various theoretical objections to Marxism need not be considered here. The core question is the relative value of Marxist and ‘constitutionalist’ arguments in terms of predictive power and, hence, as a guide to action. To address this question it is necessary to separate the rightists’ positive claim - that coalitions based on programmatic concessions can win real reforms - from their negative claim, that ‘revolutionism’ is unrealistic, worthless and illusory.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The right’s positive claim[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It should be said right away that the positive claim is true, to the extent that we are willing to treat partial gains for particular groups of workers (eg, workers in Britain; or workers in industry; or in particular industries) as gains for the working class as a whole.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]This does not, in fact, depend on the workers’ party being a minority party and hence in need of formal coalitions. If the workers’ party presents itself purely as a party of reform, it will also win members and voters from the existing parties of reform. It may then, like the British Labour Party after 1945, become a party which is in form a workers’ party capable of forming a government on its own, but is in reality in itself a coalition between advocates of the independent political representation of the working class on the one hand, and liberal or nationalist-statist reformers and political careerists on the other: to use Lenin’s very slippery expression, a “bourgeois workers’ party”.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The positive claim is, however, illusory as strategy. Part of this illusory character is due to the fact that the negative claim is false. But part of it is internal. The policy of coalitions based on programmatic concessions is, as I said earlier, based on the need to form a coalition government in order to get effective reforms. But this supposes from the outset that reforms will take the form of state action to ameliorate the situation of the workers. The reform policy is therefore a policy for the growth and increasing power of the state and increased state taxation: as the Conservative press puts it, for the “nanny state”.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The internal problem is that working class people are no more fond of being in perpetual parental leading-reins from the state than the middle classes: the aim of the emancipation of the working class is an aspiration to collective and individual freedom. The policy of reform through coalition governments therefore contains within itself - quite apart from the falsity of the negative claim - the seeds of its own overthrow. The petty tyrannies of the council house manager, the social services officials, the benefit officials, etc, become the ground of a conservative/liberal reaction against the “nanny state” among important sections of the working class.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]This is not merely a British phenomenon (the Thatcher victory in 1979). It was seen in the largest possible scale in the fall of the Stalinist regimes in 1989-91. And it has characterised the French, German and Italian electoral cycles and those of Australia, Canada and the US at least since the 1970s (in the case of the US, the Democrats play the role of the reformists).[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The right’s negative claim[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The predictive failure of the reformists’ negative claim results, most fundamentally, from the national limit of its horizons. Capitalism forms itself, from its beginnings, as a global socioeconomic formation. It is an international greasy-pole hierarchy of competing firms. Within this formation the nation-state is unavoidably a firm, and there is also a hierarchy of competing states. The understanding that the nation-state is a firm competing in the world market is a trivial commonplace of modern capitalist politics: the need to preserve or improve ‘British competitiveness’ is a constant mantra of both Labour and Tories, and equivalents can be found in the major parties of every country. It also forms part of Marx’s criticism of the Gotha programme (quoted in chapter one). To form a government within this framework therefore necessarily commits the participants to manage the interests of the nation-state in global competition.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Success in this competition allows the basis for reforms in the interests of the national working class. Or, more exactly, of sections of the national working class: there are always groups (particularly workers in small firms, young workers, migrants, etc) who must be excluded for the sake of compromise with the middle class parties, as Engels predicted in criticising Vollmar. But success is not ‘purely economic’. Capitals are able to externalise the costs of economic downswing onto weaker states and the firms (and landlords, petty producers, etc) associated with these states. Competition on the world market is thus military-political-economic.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The policy of reform through coalition governments thus entails (a) the displacement of the downswing of the business cycle onto the weaker states and their firms and populations; and (b) the displacement of the social polarisation which capitalism produces onto polarisation between nations. On the one hand, this gives the reformists’ negative claims their credibility: reforms are actually achieved and social polarisation is reduced in the successful states. On the other, the reformists necessarily commit themselves to sustaining and managing an imperial military force.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Sentimental objections to imperialism and foreign adventures, and the residual commitment to the ideas of universal military service and a people’s militia, inevitably give way, once reformists are actually in government, to the hard needs of sustaining the state’s success and standing in the global hierarchy, which is the only means by which reforms can be sustained.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Even this success at the price of bloody hands cannot forever be sustained, because externalising the business cycle has its own limits. As a world top-dog state, like Britain or the US, and the lead industrial sectors associated with this state, enter into decline, the externalised downswing phase of the business cycle returns, affecting not only them, but the other states near the top of the global hierarchy. Competition between these states intensifies. As a result, if the state as a firm is to remain globally competitive, it must endeavour to take back the reforms which have been given and drive wages and working conditions down towards the global average (their true market value). The project of reform through coalition government thereby comes to offer ‘reformism without reforms’ or merely the ‘less bad’ (Blair in preference to Major, and so on).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]But every other state is also doing the same thing and, the more they do it, the more global effective purchasing power declines, forcing more attacks ... in reality, this is merely the downswing of the business cycle postponed. It is accumulated in time and displaced onto a global scale, returning as global market pressure on the nation-state. The downswing of the ordinary business cycle must end in bankruptcies, which both free productive capital from the claims of overproduced fictional capital to income, and devalorise overinvested physical capital. It is the bankruptcies which free up space for a new economic upswing.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In the same way, the global downswing must end in the destruction of the global money and property claims of the declining world hegemon state: Britain in 1914-45; the US at some point in this coming century. In its (ultimately futile) efforts to put off this result, the declining world hegemon state must respond by an increased exploitation of its financial claims and its military dominance - as Britain did in the later 19th century, and as the US is doing now. The deferred and transposed business cycle can only overcome this problem by ending in war.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]At the point of global war between the great powers, the illusory character of the policy of reform through coalition government becomes transparent. All that maintains the reformists are mass fear of the consequences of military defeat, and direct support from the state in the form of repression of their left opponents. Thus both 1914-18 and 1939-45 produced major weakening of the reform policy within the workers’ movement and the growth of alternatives. In the event, after 1945 the destruction of British world hegemony enabled a new long phase of growth, and reformism was able to revive. We are now on the road to another collapse of reformist politics ... but what is lacking is a strategically plausible alternative.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The left: ‘All out for ...’[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The alternative offered by the left wing of the Second International was the ‘strategy of the mass strike’. The idea was an elementary one. In the first place, the strike weapon had been and remained at the core of the effectiveness of trade union struggles for immediate demands. Secondly, the struggle for the International itself was intimately connected with the struggle for May Day - waged through international one-day strike action - from its founding Congress in 1889.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The proposal of the left was that the International could take the political initiative by extending the use of the strike weapon in support of the demands of the minimum programme. As the working class was increasingly able to win victories by this weapon, its confidence and political self-assertiveness would grow, culminating (perhaps) in a general strike which challenged for power - either demanding the transfer of political power to the working class or (in the most Bakuninist form) immediately beginning the creation of the new society out of the free cooperation begun in the strike movement.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A range of theoretical grounds have been offered for this strategic line, from theoretical anarchist reasonings, through varieties of Hegelian Marxism, to - more recently - interpretations of Trotsky’s Transitional programme. As with the right, the theoretical arguments need not be considered here. Like that of the right, the strategic line of the left involved both a positive predictive claim and a negative one. The negative claim was that the method of electoral struggle and coalitions - or even the effort to build permanent mass workers’ organisations, as opposed to ad hoc organisations of mass struggle like strike committees - necessarily led to corruption of the workers’ representatives and organisations and the evolution of these organisations into mere forms of capitalist control of the working class. The positive claim was that the method of the strike struggle could be extended and generalised. Experience has something to tell us about the value of these claims.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The left’s negative claim[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The negative claim may, on its face, appear to be amply proved by the experience of the 20th century. It is certainly true of the policy of reform through coalition governments, for the reasons given above. On the experience of the 20th century, it appears to be also true of the ‘Leninist party’, which claimed to escape it. Those communist parties which took power became corrupt apparatuses tyrannising over the working classes of their countries, and most have ended in a return to capitalism, while most of the ‘official’ CPs of the capitalist countries have become simple reformist parties of the kind advocated by the right wing of the Second International. The groups to their left have, to the extent that they have attained mass support, gone down the same path and, to the extent that they have not, have in the main become fossilised sects; in either case, characterised internally by the petty dictatorship of the party bureaucracy.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The trouble is that if the left’s negative claim is taken seriously to simply true, it is self-defeating. If any effort to organise outside strikes leads to corruption, nothing can be done until the masses move into a mass strike wave, because to organise in any other situation would imply the struggle for reforms, including electoral activity, coalitions, and organisational forms which turn out to be corrupt. Unfortunately, however - as we will see in a moment - when a mass strike wave does break out, this in itself immediately poses the questions of government and forms of authority. Under these conditions, the unorganised advocates of the mass strike as an alternative to permanent organisation and the struggle for reforms are marginalised by the organised parties. Like the Russian anarchists in the summer and autumn of 1917, the anarchist CNT trade union confederation in the Spanish revolution, the Bolivian Trotskyists in 1951 and the Portuguese far left in 1974-76, they will be driven to give support to some contender for governmental power, and lose any political initiative.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]What I have just said is, in fact, no novelty. It is the substance of Marx and Engels’ objection to the Bakuninists’ general strike strategy, expressed (among other places) in Engels’ The Bakuninists at work (1873).33 The Bakuninists ‘rejected authority’ - offering, in relation to the First International, an early form of the idea that organising and fighting for reforms leads to corruption, and advocating a form of general strike strategy. When the revolutionary movement in Spain allowed them to seize power in some localities in 1873, the result of their ‘rejection of authority’ was alliance with localist forces, leading to an inability to take any coordinated action to resist the counteroffensive of the military-clerical right wing against the republicans.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The underlying problem is that ‘authority’ is, at bottom, merely a means of collective decision-making. To ‘reject authority’ is therefore to reject collective decision-making and - in the end - render yourself powerless. The existing social structures of authority then reassert themselves. In the end, anarchists have themselves discovered this, in Jo Freeman’s famous pamphlet The tyranny of structurelessness (1970).34 It happens just as much within small anarchist organisations (the ‘existing social structures of authority’ then being gender and class hierarchy) as in mass workers’ parties.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The almost uniform failure, by processes of bureaucratisation and corruption, of workers’ and socialist parties, big and small, tells us that we have not solved the problem of what sort of authority - that is, what sort of mechanisms of decision-making - will serve the interests of the working class. It also tells us that it is absolutely urgent to do so; and that the standard Trotskyist response, originated by Trotsky himself, that “the party ‘regime’ is not a political question”,35 is profoundly false. The ‘party regime’ is inevitably the image of the sort of regime we are fighting for.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]But the proposition that the tyranny of structurelessness leads to the reaffirmation of the existing social structures of authority is true not only of groups and parties, but also of mass strike movements and revolutionary crises - as the examples given above show. When we see why this is the case, we will also see why the positive side of the ‘mass strike strategy’ turns a partial truth into a strategic falsity.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The left’s positive claim[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Let us imagine for a moment a general strike which is both truly general (everyone who works for a wage withdraws their labour) and indefinite, to continue until certain demands are met, happening in a fully capitalist country like Britain. Power supplies are cut off, and with them water supplies and the telephone system. No trains or buses run, and no petrol can be obtained except from small owner-run petrol stations; this soon runs out. The supermarkets are closed, and no deliveries are made to those small owner-run shops that remain open. The hospitals and doctors’ surgeries are closed.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It should at once be apparent that this cannot continue for more than a few days. If the result is not to be general catastrophe, the workers need not simply to withdraw their labour, but to organise positively to take over the capitalists’ facilities and run them in the interests of the working class. A truly all-out indefinite general strike, therefore, immediately demands the effective de facto expropriation of the capitalists. As a result, it at once poses the question: will the state protect the capitalists’ property rights? In other words, it poses the question of political power.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Now, of course, what the advocates of the mass strike strategy were calling for was not such a truly all-out indefinite general strike called by the political party. The reality of mass strike movements is something a great deal more messy, of the sort described, for Russia, in Luxemburg’s The mass strike, but seen since then in many different countries at different times.36 The political regime falls into crisis. Some spark sets off the mass movement. Rather than a single, planned, truly all-out, indefinite general strike, there is a wave of mass strikes - some protest actions for political demands; some partial struggles for economic demands. They begin to overlap and are accompanied by political radicalisation.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]But a movement of this sort still poses the question of political power, and for exactly the same reasons. A mass strike wave disrupts normal supply chains. This can be true even of a strike in a single industry, like the miners’ strikes in Britain in 1972 and 1974. Equally, however, the capitalists’ property rights are, from their point of view, not merely rights to things, but rights to the streams of income (ie, of social surplus product) which can be made to flow from the social relations which ownership of these things represents. The strike is therefore in itself an interference with their property, and a mass strike wave threatens the security of their property. They begin to disinvest, and to press the state for stronger action against strikers.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The economy begins to come unravelled. The loss of the normal (capitalist) mechanisms of authority (decision-making) impacts on the broad masses in the form of dislocation and shortages of goods. A strike wave or revolutionary crisis can last longer than a truly all-out indefinite general strike, but it cannot last longer than a period of months - at most a couple of years. In this situation, if the workers’ movement does not offer an alternative form of authority - alternative means of decision-making which are capable of running the economy - the existing social structures of authority are necessarily reaffirmed. Either the military moves in (Spain in 1873-74 and 1936, etc) or the reformists, put in power, re-establish capitalist order (Ebert-Scheidemann in 1918; everywhere in Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II; in a much weaker sense, the 1974-79 Wilson-Callaghan government in Britain).[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif] The ‘mass strike strategy’ thus precisely fails to resolve the strategic problem of authority which the negative aspect of the left’s approach - the critique of the struggle for reforms - posed.[/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]All power to the soviets?[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Lenin in 1917 believed that the Russian working class had found in the soviets - workers’ councils - the solution to the strategic problem of authority posed by the mass strike movement. Growing out of the strike movement itself, the soviets created a form of authority which shared the characteristics of democracy and accountability from below which Marx described in the Paris Commune. Communism could therefore take the political form of the struggle for soviets and for soviet power.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In fact, as I have argued before, this belief was illusory.37 Almost as soon as the Bolsheviks had taken power, they were forced to move from a militia to a regular army, and with it came logistics and the need for a state bureaucracy. The soviets and militia could not perform the core social function of the state, defending the society against external attack. The problem of authority over the state bureaucracy was unsolved. Lenin and the Bolsheviks fell back on the forms of authority in their party and, as these proved a problem in the civil war, almost unthinkingly militarised their party and created a corrupt bureaucratic regime.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]But ‘All power to the soviets’ was also illusory in another sense. Even before they withered away into mere fronts for the Russian Communist Party, the soviets did not function like parliaments or governments - or even the Paris Commune - in continuous session. They met discontinuously, with executive committees managing their affairs. Though the Bolsheviks took power in the name of the soviets, in reality the central all-Russia coordination of the soviets was provided by the political parties - Mensheviks and SRs, and later Bolsheviks. It was Sovnarkom, the government formed by the Bolsheviks and initially including some of their allies, and its ability to reach out through the Bolshevik Party as a national organisation, which ‘solved’ the crisis of authority affecting Russia in 1917.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Subsequent history confirms this judgment. Workers’ councils and similar forms have appeared in many strike waves and revolutionary crises since 1917. In none have these forms been able to offer an alternative centre of authority, an alternative decision-making mechanism for the whole society. This role is unavoidably played by a government - either based on the surviving military-bureaucratic state core, or on the existing organisations of the workers’ movement.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]In Cuba, for example, the overreaction of the Batista regime to a small guerrilla organisation, the July 26 Movement, in November 1958 triggered a general strike which brought the regime down. The ensuing two years saw a succession of government arrangements and a continuing wave of action by the working class in various forms. The end result was a party-state regime formed by the merger of a minority of the July 26 Movement with the much larger Popular Socialist Party (Communist Party). It was the PSP which, in the end, provided the alternative centre of authority.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]I do not mean by this to glorify the bureaucratic outcomes of the dictatorship of the ‘revolutionary’ party either in Russia or in Cuba. The point is simply that the problem of decision-making authority is not solved by the creation of workers’ councils arising out of a mass strike movement. Hence, the problem of institutional forms which will make authority answerable to the masses needs to be addressed in some way other than fetishism of the mass strike and the workers’ councils. [/FONT]


    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Present relevance[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The falsity of the line of ‘All power to the soviets’ brings us momentarily back to the 2006 debate in the French Ligue. At least some in the Ligue recognised the falsity of their variant of ‘All power to the soviets’ - the ‘organs of dual power’ line of the Tenth Congress of the Mandelite Fourth International (or, as LCR authors Artous and Durand put it, the strategy of the insurrectionary general strike). But then the question is, what strategy? Durand offered a version of Eurocommunism, and this was itself a variant of the positions argued by Bernstein and the right wing of the Second International. We have seen in this chapter that this is no strategy either.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]We should also have seen that the problem with both strategies centres on the questions of government as a central coordinating authority, and the role and structural forms of the bureaucratic-coercive state. The right sought to form governments based on the existing state; the left adopted a strategy which, at the end of the day, evaded the whole problem of state authority. In truth, these issues, originally debated between the 1870s and 1900s, are live, unresolved questions in today’s politics. In the next chapter we will see what, if anything, the centre tendency in the Second International led by Karl Kautsky has to teach us on these issues.[/FONT]
  2. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    I honestly prefer this as a summary of Chapters 2 and 3 (even if I am suspicious of Macnair's ignorance of DeLeon's ideas):


    http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/495/marxism.html

    The Second International was founded in 1889 as a federation primarily of socialist political parties, based on the growth of socialist parties generally, and in particular the strength of the German SPD, and the less striking but still real progress of the French Parti Ouvrier Français. The anarchists participated in it until 1893, when the Zurich congress passed a resolution excluding all non-trade union bodies which did not recognise the need for parliamentary action.

    Trends in the workers’ movement

    By the middle 1890s it is possible to distinguish five different trends in the international workers’ movement:

    (a) Right syndicalists or ‘non-political’ trade-unionists. The most important element was the right wing in the British trade union movement, but the trend was also found elsewhere in Europe, and within Germany under the banner of the SPD, as well as in the catholic and other trade union organisations. The Russian ‘economists’ were ideological representatives of this trend with a Marxist coloration. This tendency held that it was sufficient to defend the immediate economic interests of workers in the direct struggle with their employers - primarily through trade union action, but also through seeking pro-worker legislation.

    (b) Non-Marxist socialists. The usual ‘representative figure’ is Bernstein, because he was an ex-Marxist, relatively ‘sophisticated’ in his writings and engaged in argument by the German centre and left. In fact Bernstein is not particularly representative: there were various other forms of non-Marxist socialism, like those of the English Fabians and Independent Labour Party or the semi-Radical trend in France led by Jean Jaurès. This tendency argued, on very various grounds, that the task of the movement simply was to fight within the existing state order for reforms which shifted society towards socialist ‘values’. Its direct inheritors are the modern socialist parties.

    (c) The ‘Kautskyan Marxist’ centre, mainly based in the SPD but also found in France (where the most prominent leader was Jules Guesde) and elsewhere; the Russian Iskra tendency around 1900, and hence both the Bolsheviks and part of the Mensheviks, were part of this tendency. This tendency had generally Marxist reference points. It foresaw a decline of capitalism and a revolution at some point in the future, but was ambiguous as to the role in this of the parliamentary-constitutional state. Its main focus in practice was on ‘preparatory tasks’: ie, building up the organised workers’ movement, including trade unions and cooperatives, but particularly building an organised workers’ political party which would take on all political questions posed for the society as a whole.

    (d) A ‘Hegelian Marxist’ and semi-syndicalist left tendency within the International. Prominent leaders or writers included Antonio Labriola in Italy, Herman Gorter in the Netherlands and Rosa Luxemburg in Poland and Germany. This tendency argued that the International should not merely prepare for the revolution, but should fight for it by promoting strike action and the general strike, which was seen as the means by which the proletariat escaped from the dynamics of commodity fetishism and began to emancipate itself; it tended to deprioritise or reject electoral and parliamentary activity. Luxemburg’s pamphlet The mass strike is part of the ongoing polemics of this tendency against the right and centre round the ‘strategy’ of the general strike. Trotsky seems to have been intermediate between this position and the centre.

    (e) Outright left anarcho-syndicalists were outside the International, but, as can be seen from (d), their ideas had significant indirect influence within it; they were strongest in Italy, Spain and France (another Hegelian Marxist, Georges Sorel, was a theoretician of revolutionary syndicalism in France). They were also present in the USA and Britain (International Workers of the World and De Leonist Socialist Labour Parties).

    We can thus see a ‘right’, ‘centre’ and ‘left’ of the workers’ movement. The Bolsheviks, however, were part of the centre. With Kautsky, they emphasised the construction of workers’ institutions under capitalism and especially of a workers’ political party, which should attempt to take the lead in all the questions affecting society as a whole and hence should fight for political goals and make whatever use it could of parliamentary, etc, institutions. They did not adhere to the ‘general strike’ strategy, or to the Hegelian ‘voluntarism’ (insistence on the role of the subjective and the ‘act of will’) of the left, as can be seen in Lenin’s Materialism and empirico-criticism (1909).

    World war

    The outbreak of war in 1914, of course, changed all of this. The majority of the leaders of the centre - notably Kautsky and Guesde - went along with the rightwing trends, particularly the right-syndicalists, to form pro-war majorities in most socialist parties. Socialist opposition to the war came mainly, on the one hand, on pacifist grounds from part of the non-Marxist socialists - notably Bernstein and the British ILP - and, on the other, to the left from the anarcho-syndicalists and the Hegelian Marxist semi-syndicalist left socialists. Only a minority of the centre, of which the Bolsheviks were the strongest organised component, opposed the war.

    It was in this context, and not merely because of the war, that Lenin turned to the study of Hegel. In Lenin’s polemics against Kautsky and Plekhanov and accounts of the causes of the political collapse of the Second International in 1914-15 (CW Vol 21) we begin to find references to Kautsky’s and Plehkanov’s defective dialectics, and to the voluntarist turn of phrase, the “unity of the will” of the working class. There is here an implicit, partial, self-criticism of Lenin’s political alignments in the International movement before the war. The Communist International, when it was founded, grouped a section of the old centre which had moved to the left ... but also an important part of the old left, including elements from the old left syndicalists who had never been part of the Second International. The result was a tendency to downplay the historical differences between the Bolsheviks and this tendency. These, however, resurfaced in 1920-21 as ‘new’ differences between the majority and the ‘left’ communists on participation in parliament, attitudes to the trade unions, the party question, etc, discussed in Lenin’s Leftwing communism, an infantile disorder (1920).

    Fate of the left’s strategy

    Once we see that the Hegelian Marxists before the war represented a distinct international political tendency linked to left syndicalism, we are forced to make a balance sheet of the strategy of this tendency. The conclusion is simple. It failed miserably in the face of revolutionary crises, both in Germany in 1918-19 and in Italy in 1919-21. Similar strategies have failed repeatedly in similar situations between 1921 and the present date.

    As to why the strategy failed, the answer is equally clear. The Hegelian Marxist left neglected the preparatory work, especially the construction of a workers’ political party under the existing regime, which the Kautskyan centre insisted on. They did so due to their over-reliance on the spontaneity of the mass movement to solve political problems. Their radical-left refusal of the struggle for political leadership in relation to pre-revolutionary political problems left them politically disarmed when revolutionary crisis actually broke out. This is not to say that they did not organise at all, though this is perhaps true of the German left before 1914. The problem is just as much that they tended to organise small sects - and their descendants, the ‘libertarian left’ and ‘council communists’, continue to do so to this day. There is more than a trace of these vices in the history of the Trotskyist movement, including that of the SWP.
  3. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    The policy of the right had indirect roots in the Lassalleans’ policy of demanding that the German imperial state support the workers against the capitalists; its more immediate root was the (successful) coalition policy of SPD regional leaders in southern Germany, which Engels criticised in The Peasant Question in France and Germany (1894).

    [...]

    The underlying common idea of the right wing of the movement was that the practical task of the movement was to fight for reforms in the interests of the working class. In order to win these reforms, it was necessary to make coalitions with other tendencies which were willing to ally with the workers’ movement.
    I'm not sure about the validity of the first part. In modern times, one is likely to see the reformists enter into coalition with liberals even if, as I said away from this board, one is more likely to see pro-worker economic "reform from above" come from right-populists of the "Red Tory" type.

    [Cue the hysterical "working with fascists" reaction. ]

    The problem with the historical right wing's coalitionism is that their terms of coalition were abysmally low ("it was necessary to be willing to make substantial political compromises"). Macnair identifies two problems, but only the second one counts; coalition governments in and of themselves aren't a problem, provided that certain radical measures of a distinctly "politico-political" character are enacted.

    As for regional coalitionism today, here's an interesting Financial Times article:

    SPD regional chief eyes deal with Left

    But this supposes from the outset that reforms will take the form of state action to ameliorate the situation of the workers. The reform policy is therefore a policy for the growth and increasing power of the state and increased state taxation: as the Conservative press puts it, for the “nanny state”.

    The internal problem is that working class people are no more fond of being in perpetual parental leading-reins from the state than the middle classes: the aim of the emancipation of the working class is an aspiration to collective and individual freedom. The policy of reform through coalition governments therefore contains within itself - quite apart from the falsity of the negative claim - the seeds of its own overthrow. The petty tyrannies of the council house manager, the social services officials, the benefit officials, etc, become the ground of a conservative/liberal reaction against the “nanny state” among important sections of the working class.
    I have to disagree with Macnair's political position on this. Take, for example, "cooperatives with state aid" (the object of Marx's critique re. the Gotha program) in Venezuela and in my programmatic work. Until the workers are ready to act in their own class interests (getting past being the political equivalent of a very horny teenager), the only form that a reform can take is indeed state action. Indeed, even when they do act, state action is still taken until the state is overthrown.

    That is why the appendixed Draft Formal Program of my programmatic work-in-progress (to those without this, feel free to PM me for e-mail) has a different format than the maximax-maximin program hinted at in Chapter 5, and currently in my blog link). The 32-hour workweek, class-strugglist assembly and association, people's militias, mass media solutions, etc. are separated from the core of "The Democracy Question" (the DOTP).



    On the other hand, I completely agree with this crap:

    Success in this competition allows the basis for reforms in the interests of the national working class. Or, more exactly, of sections of the national working class: there are always groups (particularly workers in small firms, young workers, migrants, etc) who must be excluded for the sake of compromise with the middle class parties, as Engels predicted in criticising Vollmar.
    The audience of my Draft Formal Program is indeed the same as that mentioned by Macnair: the non-unionized workforce. I suggest that "calls to action" for working-class unionization and party affiliation be based on stringent conditions (I'll comment on this in the Miscellaneous Questions chapter): that union officials be on an average workers' wage, that they are recallable, etc. No workers' union that meets such criteria should be allowed to affiliate with Class-Strugglist Social Labour!
  4. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Now, on to what Macnair should have called the ultra-left (italicized for revolutionary-centrist emphasis)...

    The negative claim was that the method of electoral struggle and coalitions - or even the effort to build permanent mass workers’ organisations, as opposed to ad hoc organisations of mass struggle like strike committees - necessarily led to corruption of the workers’ representatives and organisations and the evolution of these organisations into mere forms of capitalist control of the working class.
    The, ahem, reductionism of parliamentary socialists on this question is their equation of electoral support with political support. The similar reductionism of ultra-lefts - and not just those in the International Childish Current - is their equation of "support for [economically] socialist measures" with said political support. In other words, broad economism.

    It's obvious why Macnair doesn't mention mass spoilage campaigns running simultaneously with typical electoral pandering as a means of gathering political support (but I'll mention this to cap Chapter 5). This paragraph also makes clear that abstention is an ultra-leftist position based on organizational defeatism ("the left’s negative claim is taken seriously to be simply true, it is self-defeating").
  5. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    "The Soviets Dare Not Become State Organizations"



    I had to use this sound bite from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky to succinctly describe my view on workers' councils ("All Power to the Soviets" being an ultra-left sham). Now I'll move on:

    But ‘All power to the soviets’ was also illusory in another sense. Even before they withered away into mere fronts for the Russian Communist Party, the soviets did not function like parliaments or governments - or even the Paris Commune - in continuous session. They met discontinuously, with executive committees managing their affairs. Though the Bolsheviks took power in the name of the soviets, in reality the central all-Russia coordination of the soviets was provided by the political parties - Mensheviks and SRs, and later Bolsheviks. It was Sovnarkom, the government formed by the Bolsheviks and initially including some of their allies, and its ability to reach out through the Bolshevik Party as a national organisation, which ‘solved’ the crisis of authority affecting Russia in 1917.

    Subsequent history confirms this judgment. Workers’ councils and similar forms have appeared in many strike waves and revolutionary crises since 1917. In none have these forms been able to offer an alternative centre of authority, an alternative decision-making mechanism for the whole society. This role is unavoidably played by a government - either based on the surviving military-bureaucratic state core, or on the existing organisations of the workers’ movement.
    I actually must ask this one question: how frequently do Venezuela's communal councils meet? If they meet more frequently than twice or thrice a year, they would in fact be a significant improvement over workers councils in the Soviet sense.

    I said in my work that "modern communication technology has made possible the revival of the ancient Greek body known as the Assembly, wherein any citizen (albeit exclusive of the female gender and the slave class status, but never exclusive of the remaining non-owners of property) was able to attend, make political speeches, and vote on decisions being discussed." The ability to do those three things depends a lot on how often the relevant organs meet.

    The main reason why soviets are an ultra-left joke is because the typical perception of a workers' council is one that merely grows out of the strike movement itself (especially one that is spontaneous). This is clear cut in Trotsky's own Transitional Program, that soviets will emerge out of the struggles of factory committees (I criticized workplace committee movements in my "Class-Strugglist Labour: For the Politico-Ideological Independence of the Working Class" section in Chapter 4).

    I mentioned above Macnair's ignorance of DeLeon's "socialist industrial unionism," but in the theory of the SIU (as opposed to cheap syndicalism like the IWW) it is clear that workers' councils formed by the SIU do not merely grow from strike movements. Because strikes are de-emphasized somewhat as a means of class struggle, there's more time to meet for the purposes of education, agitation, and organization.



    P.S. - Man, did I sound like Ted Grant, Alan Woods, the IMT, etc. there or what (frequent mentions of "ultra-left")?
  6. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    Since the 3rd international does emphasize direct action (at least from what I can read on Marxists.org), what does this say about Lenin?

    a. Did he ignore the "Erfurtian" strategy?
    b. Was he the advocate of a minority position?
    c. Is there something more than just direct action (e.g. the Kautskyist aproach)?
    d. Did the Erfurtian strategy not apply (in the sence of what Lenin said on the concept of the workers' state: it was quite normal for them to use that concept in the early 1920's, not there after)?
  7. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    I saw an interesting part from one of the Lars Lih videos. This Tom Brokaw lookalike and soundalike ( ) said something to the effect re. The Road to Power that, according to Kautsky himself, Luxemburg's emphasis on "action" could indeed be appropriate for a revolutionary period.

    In my own work, I quoted the guy who wrote Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution. He said that Lenin even considered at one point changing the "all power to the soviets" slogan to "all power to the factory committees."

    [That, IMO, would still have been a step too far to the ultra-left.]

    Polemics aside, this is probably a concession of mine to you re. the applicability of something "transitional" in a revolutionary period (but the demands need to be more political, per Cockshott's recent stuff on the credit crunch).
  8. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    I wanted to bump up this chapter one last time because I don't have the "spine" to start a History forum thread. Not much in terms of economics was discussed in this book (naturally), but it should be kept in mind that Marx's Capital - writing about the "impending" downfall of capitalism, as opposed to David Harvey's "3% growth forever" musings - as well as Bernstein's Revisionism, were products of what even today's economists are so ignorant of: the Long Depression.

    Bernstein proclaimed Marx "wrong" because the world had just emerged from this.

    [Also, there has been a "long depression" for workers in developed countries, since real wages have gone down somewhat over the past 30 years.]
  9. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Left-Communist admits perpetual failure of spontaneous workers councils (link to article by Sheila Cohen)



    The term ‘Workers’ Councils’ can perhaps stand as a catch-all title for an unpremeditated, quasi-spontaneous, ‘ground-up’ organisational form reproduced over many periods and across many countries by groups of workers previously unaware of such a structure or of its historical precedents. Its highest form the Soviet, its ‘lowest’ the simple workplace representatives’ committee, this formation recurs time and again in situations of major class struggle and even everyday industrial conflict.

    Why do workers always, independently and apparently ’spontaneously’, adopt the same mass meetings-based, delegate-generating, committee-constructed form for their most powerful expressions of resistance? The answer is simple, because the form is simple; the form is constructed from the requirements of the situation, not plucked from thin air. Workers in a situation of upsurge are unlikely to look around at a range of possible alternatives: the workers’ council structure, at whatever level, immediately serves the necessities of the situation.

    [...]

    As this comment suggests, a related and equally defining characteristic of such delegate-based, accountable workers’ organisations was their freedom from official and institutional structures, in particular, of course, the established trade unions. Such independence and autonomy continually recurs as a feature of the workers’ council formation.
    Here's something interesting in light of my position against broad economism (including the strike fetish economism of the ultra-left):

    The history of workers’ council formation reveals that, perhaps by contrast to socialist orthodoxy, such transformation of consciousness is almost universally rooted in material issues which tend to spark often insurrectionary levels of revolt from an apparently trivial or ‘economistic’ base. Perhaps the most historic example of this is the Petrograd typographers’ strike in 1905 which, in Trotsky’s words, ’started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism’ – as well as, of course, generating the first Petrograd Soviet (Trotsky 1971 p85). The resurgence of soviet power in the February 1917 revolution was in its turn sparked by women textile workers’ strikes and protests over bread shortages (Trotsky 1967 p110) as well as a strike against victimisation at the giant Putilov engineering works. In Italy, working-class women forced to queue for hours for meagre rations as well as working up to 12 hours a day in the factories launched a hunger riot which ’soon reached insurrectionary proportions when the women made [a] crucial link with workers’ industrial power…’ (Gluckstein pp169-70).

    History provides many other examples of movements which, while ultimately challenging the system, are rooted in relatively mundane grievances. In the Chilean, Portuguese and Iranian upsurges of the mid to late 1970s emphasis was placed by workers, as always, on basic material needs; as one Chilean agricultural worker put it, ‘We’ve people to feed and families to keep. And we’ve had it up to here’ (Gonzalez 1987, p51). Yet out of these materially-based struggles ‘there emerged a new form of organisation …calling itself the ‘industrial belt’ – the cordon’ (p51, emphasis in original).

    In Portugal, even after quasi-revolutionary committees, CRTSMs, were established in the factories, ‘Those who set [them] up saw the workers’ commissions as being merely economic’. In Iran, the movement which led up to the 1979 ‘revolution’ was preceded by ‘…strikes, sit-ins and other industrial protests [most of which] were confined to economic demands’ (Poya 1987).

    Such ‘economistic’ considerations, often dismissed by the intellectual left, are shown over and over not to preclude an explosion of consciousness which rapidly races towards overarching class and political considerations in a dynamic which, crucially, is not dependent in pre-existing ’socialist’ awareness. As one organizer In 1930s America noted, ‘the so much bewailed absence of a socialist ideology on the part of the workers, really does not prevent [them] from acting quite anti-capitalistically’ (Brecher p165). Draper (1978) succinctly sums up this point: ‘To engage in class struggle it is not necessary to “believe in” class struggle any more than it is necessary to believe in Newton in order to fall from an airplane’ (p42).
    The problem, however, is that the form is conducive to left-economistic fantasies. Glorified strike committees and growing political struggles out of mere economic struggles go hand in hand.

    The final analysis is ultimately this:

    The above analysis has not sought to address the question of the historic failure of the workers’ council formation to achieve a lasting regime of workers’ power and ownership, participative democracy and freedom from the oppressions under which the world currently labours.