Pecking off What a series of exchanges the past couple of weeks! From economistic overtones on the part of Chris Strafford to responses by Pham Binh, I’ll try to respond to each as concisely as I can. First, Chris Strafford’s move to the Anti-Capitalist Initiative seems to be a move with economistic and especially trade unionist overtones, yet I don’t know what to make of his concerning statement of “collapsing into the Labour Representation Committee” in light of polemics for working inside and outside the Labour Party. I have made my case in past letters that three kinds of parties need to exist on the British left to supplant Labourism: communist worker parties, proletocratic or proletarian-not-necessarily-communist parties, and continental ‘bourgeois worker’ parties. Strafford’s concerns about CPGB relations with some left Labourites are at least somewhat valid, because of the Weekly Worker’s straw man of equating all left-reformist projects in the UK with ‘Labour mark two’. Continental ‘bourgeois worker’ parties didn’t start out as somewhat political projects by a country’s trade unions, but were formed independently of trade union activity. Second, in all the exchanges between Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc, Pham Binh and Mike Macnair on ‘liquidationism’, for some reason nobody mentioned the German precedent historically or currently (the four participants I just mentioned). Even if the liquidationists succeeded, their amateurism would have been less damaging than, say, the SAPD of Germany liquidating its illegal underground during the anti-socialist laws - the illegal underground apparatus of the Gotha programme party was simply much larger. Contemporarily speaking, if a mass party organisation had a wing for legal activity and a wing for mass civil disobedience campaigns and other ‘extra-legal’ but not bomb-throwing-style illegal activity, trying to wrap up the latter through party mechanisms would be tantamount to liquidationism. Third, Pham Binh’s concluding remarks are mixed, in my opinion. There’s too much attachment to unions; the main problem isn’t that they’re reformist (which most of them certainly are), but that they’re rarely political in the first place. The comrade mentions the Eisenacher-Lassallean unity of 1875, but the Lassalleans pointed to problems with union activism more accurately than any left communist ever did (which almost circles back to my statement above on Strafford). Also, conflated as one are programme, strategy and ‘theory’. Programmatic unity is paramount, for without a revolutionary programme there can be no revolutionary movement. Next in line is strategic unity, around the revolutionary strategy that adapts orthodox Marxism to modern circumstances (alternative culture and an independent but nonetheless institutional approach, refusal of non-proletocratic coalitions, of strike and council fetishes, of popular and other fronts that aren’t both communitarian and populist, etc). Way, way down the pecking order is ‘theory’ (whether historical * la state capitalism vs bureaucratic collectivism vs degenerated/deformed workers’ state, or contemporary * la inclusive democracy, power theory of value, etc).
