Mike Macnairs Book on Strategy. Paul Cockshott Mike Macnair of the Communist Party of Great Britain has recently written a book[macnair] whose avowed aim is to reformulate left strategy along Kautskian lines. One might say: surely this is a retrograde step politically. But in a sense a movement towards Kautskyism would be an advance for the official communist movement. Macnair distinguishes between the Kautskian trend in Social Democracy and right wing Social Democracy. Besides recalling how much of orthodox Leninism is actually Kautskyism at second hand, Macnair makes the very accurate observation that: The coalitionist policy of the right wing of the Second International has been, since 1945, the policy of Second International socialists and ‘official communists’ alike. The substantive difference between them, before first Euro-communism and then the fall of the USSR, was that ‘official communists’ proposed for each country a socialist-liberal coalition that would commit to geopolitical formal neutrality combined with friendly relations with the Soviet bloc. With the Soviet sheet anchor gone, the majority of the former ‘official communists’ are at best disoriented, and at worst form the right wing of governing coalitions (as is the case with the ex- communists and ex-fellow-travellers within the Labour Party in Britain). A key discriminating feature of the Kautskian tendency was its opposition to coalitions with bourgeois parties and an insistence that it would only enter into government when it had the requisite majority to rule un-aided. In this sense then, a move to Kautskyism would amount to a considerable radicalisation of the communists in Europe. So the book is significant. I will argue however, that it is marked by a failure to go beyond certain fatal limits of classical social democracy, and also by a failure to have any positive theory of socialism. This lack of a theory of socialism is first evident in a non-treatment of the history of the USSR and China, and later in a failure to spell out what sort of economy the socialist movement should be fighting for. On the first point he writes: Under the Soviet-style bureaucratic regimes there was no objective tendency towards independent self-organisation of the working class. Rather, there were episodic explosions; but to the extent that the bureaucracy did not succeed in putting a political cap on these, they tended towards a pro-capitalist development. The strategic line of a worker revolution against the bureaucracy - whether it was called `political revolution' as it was by the orthodox Trotskyists, or `social revolution' by state-capitalism and bureaucratic-collectivism theorists - lacked a material basis. He extends the argument to apply to orthodox Stalinists who have to explain why the real Stalinists were not able to organise opposition to the restoration of capitalism. This is an interesting observation but it has two drawbacks. 1. Its focus is exclusively on the USSR and Eastern Europe post WWII. It ignores the experience of China during the Cultural Revolution, and if Getty[getty1985origins] and others are to be believed, the experience of the Great Purges. There was working class participation there. Did this arise from an 'objective tendancy'? 2. It could be a council of despair. Since the abolition of private capitalism is bound to remove the old class struggle between labour and capital over profits. If such trades union struggle is a precondition of class consciousness, then socialism is bound to remove that class consciousness. Whether it is bureaucratic socialism or not. What then is to be the social basis of resistance to capitalist restoration. He argues with respect to the USSR What happened instead was to render concrete the 1850s warnings of Marx and Engels against the premature seizure of power in Germany,16 which formed the basis of Kautsky’s ‘caution’ in the 1890s and 1900s. By choosing to represent the peasantry and other petty proprietors (especially state bureaucrats), the workers’ party disabled itself from representing the working class, but instead became a sort of collective Bonaparte. The Bolshevik leaders could see and feel it happening to themselves,17 and in 1919-1923 the Comintern flailed around with a succession of short-lived strategic concepts, each of which would - it was hoped - break the isolation of the revolution. These strategic concepts are not simply rendered obsolete by the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The fate of the other ‘socialist countries’ also proves them to be a strategic blind alley. This was of course like the argument of Kautsky during the 20s. Is it valid to say that the CPs represented petty proprietors when in power? Well there is some truth in it to the extent that so long as petty peasant production existed, it created wings within the CPs who defended its interest Bukharin, Gomulka, Deng. But these were just one wing, and in most cases they did not come out on top. In the USSR private peasant agriculture was largely eliminated by collectivisation. And during the 50s and 60s, state farms expanded at the expense even of collectives. In Poland after 56 the pro-petty proprietor wing did come out on top, but that was not generally the case. In the DDR, CSSR and Bulgaria state or collective agriculture was the rule. The crisis of the socialist system, Poland aside, was not generally precipitated by the demands of petty proprietors in agriculture. The identification of state bureaucrats with petty proprietors is an unconvincing throwaway phrase, not justified by any argument.
