In the third article of this series I argued that the
“strategy of the mass strike” foundered on the need of the society for a
central coordinating authority: the mass strike wave, and the strike committees
it throws up, break down the existing capitalist framework of authority, but do
not provide an alternative (Weekly
Worker March 30).
The resulting dislocation of the economy leads to pressure for a return to
capitalist order.
The Kautskyan centre’s solution to this problem was to build
up the united workers’ party and its associated organisations (trade
unions, etc) as an alternative centre of authority. This gradual process could
find its expression in the electoral results of the workers’ party.
When it became clear that the workers’ party had a majority
of the popular vote, the workers’ party would be justified in taking power away
from the capitalists and implementing its minimum programme. If elections were
rigged so that a popular majority did not produce a parliamentary majority, or
legal or bureaucratic constitutional mechanisms were used to stop the workers’
party implementing its programme, the use of the strike weapon, force, etc
would be justified.
In implementing its programme, however, in Kautsky’s view
the workers’ party would use the existing state bureaucratic apparatus:
this merely reflected the need of ‘modern society’ for professional
administration. In this respect Kautsky in his most revolutionary phase had
already broken from the democratic republicanism of Marx’s writings on the
Commune and Critique of the Gotha programme and Engels’ arguments in Can
Europe disarm?
In a series of arguments in spring 1917, and more
elaborately in State and revolution, Lenin proposed an alternative: ‘All
power to the soviets’. The soviets, he argued, represented the “Commune form of
state” praised by Marx in The civil war in France, and the power of the
soviets was the natural form of working class rule. On this basis the
Bolsheviks spent much of spring-summer 1917 struggling to win a majority in the
soviets. And (as it happened, against Lenin’s advice) the Bolshevik leadership
and their Left Socialist Revolutionary and anarchist allies launched the
October revolution under the banner of the Military Revolutionary Committee of
the Petrograd Soviet and timed it to coincide with the October 25 meeting of
the All-Russia Congress of Soviets - which turned out to have a Bolshevik
majority and a far more overwhelming majority for ‘All power to the soviets’.
I have already argued in the third article in this series
that the belief that ‘All power to the soviets’ represented an alternative
political authority was mistaken. The Russian soviets came closer than any
other historical body of workers’ councils to creating a national political
authority. They did so because until October 25 the Menshevik and SR
leaderships continued to believe that they had a majority in the soviets
nationwide, and one which could serve as a support for the provisional
government pending the creation by the constituent assembly of a ‘proper’ - ie,
parliamentary - democracy.
No other ‘reformist’ or bureaucratic mass party has made the
same mistake of using its own resources to develop a national coordination of
workers’ councils. No far left formation or alliance has proved able to create
such a coordination against the will of the existing mass parties.
Moreover, as several anarchist critics of Bolshevism
recognise, the soviets were far from simple workers’ councils consisting of
factory delegates. They contained the workers’ and peasants’ parties, and their
political role was animated by the political role of the workers’ and peasants’
parties. October did indeed create a central coordinating authority for Russia:
the Sovnarkom, or council of people’s commissioners. But this was ... a
provisional government based on the parties that supported ‘All power to
the soviets’: initially a coalition of the Bolsheviks and Left SRs with some
passive support from the Menshevik-Internationalists; later a purely Bolshevik
government.
Nor could Sovnarkom base itself fully on the soviets and
their militia aspect. The soviets did not attain a governing character, but met
episodically rather than in continuous session; the militia proved insufficient
to hold back either the Germans or the whites, so that Sovnarkom was forced to
create a regular army and with it a bureaucratic apparatus. As I said in the
third article, 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 top-down, bureaucratic regime.
The 2nd Congress of the Comintern in 1920 in its ‘Theses on
the role of the Communist Party in the proletarian revolution’ recognised this
reality: that it is a party or parties and a government created
by a party or parties that can pose an alternative form of authority to the
capitalist order. But the theses over-theorised this recognition and carried
with it organisational conceptions that prevented the working class as a class
exercising power through the Communist Party and communist government.
Thesis 5 says that “Political power can only be seized,
organised and led by a political party, and in no other way. Only when the
proletariat has as a leader an organised and tested party with well-marked aims
and with a tangible, worked-out programme for the next measures to be taken,
not only at home but also in foreign policy, will the conquest of political
power not appear as an accidental episode, but serve as the starting point for
the permanent communist construction of society by the proletariat.”
And thesis 9 asserts: “The working class does not only need
the Communist Party before and during the conquest of power, but also after the
transfer of power into the hands of the working class. The history of the
Communist Party of Russia, which has been in power for almost three years,
shows that the importance of the Communist Party does not diminish after the
conquest of power by the working class, but on the contrary grows
extraordinarily.”
However, the political ground given for these claims is the
argument for the vanguard character of the party (theses 1-3). And a critical
conclusion drawn is the need for strict Bonapartist centralism (“iron military
order”) in party organisation (theses 13-17). I discussed both of these in the
sixth article in this series and identified how they can serve to destroy the
character of the party as one through which the proletariat can rule (Weekly Worker April 27).
In fact, both arguments are wholly unnecessary to the
proposition that “political power can only be seized, organised and led by a
political party” (thesis 5). This proposition follows merely from the original
arguments of the Marxists against the Bakuninists and opponents of working
class participation in elections. If the working class is to take power, it
must lead the society as a whole. To do so, it must address all questions
animating politics in the society as a whole and all its elements. To do so is
to become a political party even if you call yourself an ‘alliance’ or
‘unity coalition’ or whatever. To fail to do so is to fail even as an
‘alliance’ or ‘unity coalition’.
The converse of these points is that in the transition to
capitalist modernity every state becomes in a certain sense a party-state. A
critical difference between the successful dynastic absolutists in much of
continental Europe and the failed Stuart absolutists is that the Bourbon,
Habsburg and Hohenzollern absolutists made themselves prisoners of a
party - the party which was to emerge, largely bereft of its state, as the
‘party of order’ in 19th century Europe. The Stuarts, following an older
statecraft, avoided becoming prisoners of a party. James I, Charles I,
Charles II and James II all endeavoured to manoeuvre between the
Anglican-episcopal variant of the party of order, outright catholics and
Calvinist critics of Anglican-episcopalianism in order to preserve their
freedom of action as monarchs. This policy of preserving the individual
monarch’s personal freedom of action destroyed the political basis necessary to
preserve the dynastic regime.
The result was a new sort of party-state: the
revolution-state created in Britain in 1688-1714. This state was politically
based on a bloc of Whigs and revolution (Williamite and later Hanoverian)
Tories. The Jacobites, who clung to the Stuart dynasty, and the catholics, were
excluded from political power and episodically repressed.
In the American revolution similarly what was created was a
Whig party-state. The Whigs differentiated into Federalists and
Democratic-Republicans, but outright Tories were largely driven out of the
society.
The dialectical opposite of the American revolution was that
over the later 18th to early 19th century, classical Whiggism was largely
marginalised in Britain and the state became - as it is today - a
Hanoverian-Tory party state, successively dominated by Liberal-Tory and
Conservative-Tory parties and since 1945 by Conservative-Tories and
Labour-Tories.
A similar story might be told of the French revolution. At
the end of the day the result of the French revolution is a republican-state in
which catholic monarchist legitimism is excluded from political power; and
since 1958 a Gaullist-state dominated by Gaullist-Gaullist and
Socialist-Gaullist parties.
The idea that political power can only be taken by a party
or party coalition and that the resulting new state is necessarily a
party-state does not, therefore, at all imply the tyrannous character of the
party-state created in the Soviet Union and imitated in many other countries.
This tyrannous character reflects the decision of the Bolsheviks (a) to create
Bonapartist centralism within their party and (b) to use state repression (the
ban on factions, etc) to resist the natural tendency of the party to split
within the framework of the common party identification created by the new state
form. Behind these decisions, as I argued before, is the fact that the
Russian party-state created in 1918-21 was socially based on the peasantry.
The Comintern’s united front turn in 1921-22 meant
recognising the reality that there was more than one party of the working
class, although the communists hoped to displace the socialists as the main
party. In this context, ‘All power to the soviets’ could not express the
working class’s need for an alternative central coordinating authority; but
neither could ‘All power to the Communist Party’.
The 4th Comintern Congress in 1922 adopted as thesis 11 of
its ‘Theses on tactics’ the slogan of the “workers’ government, or workers’ and
peasants’ government”. The thesis is relatively short but quite complex.1
It begins with the proposition that the slogan can be used
as a “general agitational slogan”. In this sense the “workers’ government” is
clearly intended to be merely a more comprehensible way of expressing the idea
of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In some countries, however, “the position of bourgeois
society is particularly unstable and where the balance of forces between the
workers’ parties and the bourgeoisie places the question of government on the
order of the day as a practical problem requiring immediate solution. In these
countries the workers’ government slogan follows inevitably from the entire
united front tactic.” The socialists are advocating and forming coalitions with
the bourgeoisie, “whether open or disguised”. The communists counterpose to
this “a united front involving all workers, and a coalition of all workers’
parties around economic and political issues, which will fight and finally
overthrow bourgeois power”.
The paragraph continues: “Following a united struggle of all
workers against the bourgeoisie, the entire state apparatus must pass into the
hands of a workers’ government, so strengthening the position of power held by
the working class.” This statement is extremely unclear. At a minimum it could
mean that all the government ministries must be held by members of the
workers’ coalition; more probably that there would be a significant purge
of the senior civil service, army tops and judiciary to give the workers’
coalition control; at the furthest extreme, that the whole state apparatus down
to office clerks and soldiers should be sacked and replaced by appointees of
the workers’ coalition.
A critical paragraph follows: “The most elementary tasks of
a workers’ government must be to arm the proletariat, disarm the bourgeois
counterrevolutionary organisations, bring in control over production, shift the
main burden of taxation onto the propertied classes and break the resistance of
the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie.” This is the only statement of the
substantive tasks or minimum platform of a workers’ government in the thesis.
Such a government “is possible only if it is born out of the
struggle of the masses and is supported by combative workers’ organisations
formed by the most oppressed sections of workers at grassroots level. However,
even a workers’ government that comes about through an alignment of
parliamentary forces - ie, a government of purely parliamentary origin - can
give rise to an upsurge of the revolutionary workers’ movement.”
This pair of statements amounts to a non-dialectical
contradiction. It is illusory to suppose both (a) that a workers’
government can only be possible if it is born out of the mass struggle
and supported by mass organisations - ie, soviets - and (b) that a
parliamentary coalition agreement can cause an upsurge of the mass
movement. The contradiction reflects the absence of a full theorisation of the
prior transition in the Comintern leadership’s collective thought from ‘All
power to the soviets’ to ‘All power to the Communist Party’. The first
proposition is within the framework of ‘All power to the soviets’, and in a
fairly strong sense is within the framework of the mass strike strategy. The
second is more like Kautskyan strategy in the most ‘revolutionary’ reading that
can be given to The road to power.
The next paragraph addresses communist participation in
coalition governments. This requires (a) “guarantees that the workers’
govern-ment will conduct a real struggle against the bourgeoisie of the kind
already outlined”, and (b) three organisational conditions: (1) communist ministers
“remain under the strictest control of their party”; (2) they “should be in
extremely close contact with the revolutionary organisations of the masses”;
and (3) “The Communist Party has the unconditional right to maintain its own
identity and complete independence of agitation.”
This amounts to a government without collective
responsibility. But a government without collective responsibility is not a
decision-making mechanism for the society as a whole - ie, not a government at
all.
The thesis tells us that there are dangers in the policy. To
identify these, it points out that there are several types of government that
can be called a workers’ government but are not “a truly proletarian, socialist
government”. In this respect, the thesis continues the line of ‘All power to
the Communist Party’: “The complete dictatorship of the proletariat can only be
a genuine workers’ government … consisting of communists.”
But “Communists are also prepared to work alongside those
workers who have not yet recognised the necessity of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Accordingly communists are also ready, in certain conditions and
with certain guarantees, to support a non-communist workers’ government.
However, the communists will still openly declare to the masses that the
workers’ government can be neither won nor maintained without a revolutionary
struggle against the bourgeoisie.”
The conditions and the guarantees must be those stated
earlier. But in this context it becomes apparent that the minimum platform, the
“most elementary tasks of a workers’ government”, is utterly inadequate as a
basis for deciding whether communists should participate in a coalition
government or remain in opposition.
l “Arm the proletariat, disarm the
bourgeois counterrevolutionary organisations.” This is a statement of general
principle. How? Disarming the bourgeoisie, in the sense of the
possession of weapons by individual bourgeois, is a task that can only be
performed through the exercise of military force. More practically, disarming
the bourgeoisie means breaking the loyalty of the existing soldiers to the
state regime.
This, in reality, is also the key to arming the proletariat:
as long as the army of the capitalist state remains politically intact,
the proletarians will at best be equipped with civilian small-arms - not much
of a defence against tanks and helicopter gunships. The tsarist regime was
disarmed by the decay of discipline caused by defeat in the run-up to February
and by the effects, from February, of the Petrograd Soviet’s Order No1, opening
up the army to democratic politics.
l “Bring in control over production.”
This phrase is nicely ambiguous. What sort of control? If what is meant
is workers’ control in the factories, it is utterly illusory to suppose that a government
could do more than call for it and support it: the workers would have to take
control for themselves.
If what is meant is the creation of sufficient planning and
rationing to deal with immediate economic dislocation caused by the bourgeoisie’s
endeavours to coerce the workers’ government, this implies much more concrete
measures, such as closure of the financial markets and nationalisation of the
banks and other financial institutions; seizure into public hands of capitalist
productive firms that endeavour to decapitalise or close, whether or not this
is to lead to long-term nationalisation; the introduction of rationing of
essential goods (food, etc) that become scarce as a result of capitalist
endeavours to withdraw their capital ... and so on.
l “Shift the main burden of taxation
onto the propertied classes.” This is a less precise version of the demand of
the Communist manifesto for a sharply progressive income tax. Its vagueness,
in fact, makes it empty. A sharply progressive income tax strengthens the
position of the working class both because it is directly redistributive
against the possessing classes, and because its existence asserts limits on
market inequality. It is for this reason that the right in the US, here, and
across Europe, has begun the fight to cash its political gains of the last 25
years in the form of ‘flat taxes’.
However, all taxes come out of the social surplus product,
and thus at the end of the day the main burden of all taxation is at the
expense of the propertied classes: if the taxes on workers are raised, the
result is in the long run to force capitalists to pay these taxes in the form
of wages. The slogan is thus empty and is in fact diplomatic in character.
“Break the resistance of the counterrevolutionary
bourgeoisie.” This point is so empty of content as to need no further comment.
Without a clear minimum platform, the idea of a workers’
government reduces to what it began with - a more ‘popular’ expression for the
idea that the workers should rule - or to what it ends with - a communist
government. It does not amount to a basis for working out concrete
proposals for unity to the workers who follow the socialist parties.
This is made visible in Trotsky’s ‘Report on the 4th
Congress’.2 Trotsky’s initial account of the
workers’ government policy is as a policy to counterpose to the socialists’
coalitionism: one that expresses in a very basic way the idea of class
independence.
Trotsky expresses the view that there might be a
workers’ (or workers’ and farmers’) government in the sense of the
Bolshevik-Left SR coalition of October 1917 - ie, a government of communists
and left socialists as the beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But the fact that this coalition was based on a very concrete minimum platform
- the distributive land policy as the solution to the food problem, peace
without annexations, and ‘All power to the soviets’ - is wholly absent from
this description.
The question becomes concrete in relation to Saxony, where
the SPD and KPD together had a majority in the Land assembly and the
local SPD proposed to the KPD a provincial government of the workers’ parties.
The Comintern congress told the KPD to reject this proposal. But the reasons
given by Trotsky are not political reasons that could readily be explained to
the ranks and supporters of the SPD:
“If you, our German communist comrades, are of the opinion
that a revolution is possible in the next few months in Germany, then we would
advise you to participate in Saxony in a coalition government and to utilise
your ministerial posts in Saxony for the furthering of political and
organisational tasks and for transforming Saxony in a certain sense into a communist
drill ground so as to have a revolutionary stronghold already reinforced in a
period of preparation for the approaching outbreak of the revolution. But this
would be possible only if the pressure of the revolution were already making
itself felt, only if it were already at hand. In that case it would imply only
the seizure of a single position in Germany which you are destined to capture
as a whole. But at the present time you will of course play in Saxony the role
of an appendage, an impotent appendage because the Saxon government itself is
impotent before Berlin, and Berlin is - a bourgeois government.”
This is at best a vulgarised form of the arguments of Engels
and Kautsky against minority participation of a workers’ party in a left
bourgeois government.
The emptiness of the Comintern’s workers’ government slogan
had several sources. ‘All power to the soviets’ as a general strategy was
intimately linked to the sub-Bakuninist mass strike strategy, which ignored or marginalised
the problem of coordinating authority, and government is a particular form of
coordinating authority.
‘All power to the Communist Party’ had the effect of
emptying out the programme of the party in relation to questions of state form,
because the Bolsheviks in 1918-21 had effectively abandoned this programme: the
workers were in substance invited to trust the communist leaders because they
were ‘really’ committed to fighting the capitalists.
When, within this framework, the Comintern proposes the
possibility of a socialist-communist coalition, it can say nothing more than
that the condition for such a government is that it must be ‘really committed
to fighting the capitalists’: this is the meaning of the empty statements of
abstract general principle of the minimum platform.
The concrete minimum platform used by the Bolsheviks
in summer-autumn 1917, which formed the basis of the government coalition
created in October - summarised in the tag, “Land, peace and bread: all power
to the soviets” - is very precisely adapted to Russian conditions at the time.
Any government coalition proposal elsewhere would need to have a similarly
highly concrete and highly localised character. At the international
level, the minimum government policy that would allow the communists to accept
government responsibility would have to be concerned with state form and
how to render the state accountable to the working class, leaving the national
parties to identify the particular concrete economic, foreign policy, etc measures
by which these principles could be rendered agitational in the immediate
concrete circumstances of their country.
Trotsky’s argument for the slogan in the 1938 Transitional
programme gets halfway to this point: “Of all parties and organisations
which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name, we
demand that they break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road
of struggle for the workers’ and farmers’ government. On this road we promise
them full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time, we
indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should
in our opinion form the programme of the ‘workers’ and farmers’ government’.3
The problem is that the “transitional demands” of this programme
address state power only in the form of ‘All power to the soviets’. They
therefore either remain abstract or become economistic, as in the various
British left groups’ ‘Labour government committed to socialist policies’.
The most fundamental misunderstanding appears at the very
beginning of the Comintern thesis. In some countries “the position of
bourgeois society is particularly unstable and … the balance of forces between
the workers’ parties and the bourgeoisie places the question of government on
the order of the day as a practical problem requiring immediate solution.”
In reality, in parliamentary regimes every general
election poses the question of government - and every general round of
local elections, since it indicates the electoral relationship of forces
between the parties at national level, also poses it. (In presidential regimes
the question of government is formally only posed in presidential
elections, but is indirectly posed in elections to the legislature.)
The fact that it does so is central to the mechanism of the
two-party system of corrupt politicians by which the capitalist class rules
at the daily level in parliamentary regimes. The system was invented in
Britain after the revolution of 1688 and has since been copied almost
everywhere.
The patronage powers of government allow a party to manage
the parliamentary assembly, to promote its own electoral support and to make
limited changes in the interests of its base and/or its ideology. The ‘outs’
therefore seek by any means to be ‘in’. In this game the bureaucratic
state core quite consciously promotes those parties and individual politicians
who are more loyal to its party ideology. The result is that outside
exceptional circumstances of extreme crisis of the state order, it is
only possible to form a government on the basis of a coalition in which those
elements loyal to the state-party have a veto.
Those socialists who insist that the immediate task of the
movement is to fight for a socialist government - outside extreme crisis
of the state - necessarily enter into the game and become socialist-loyalists.
Eighteenth century British ‘commonwealthsmen’ and
republicans understood the nature of the game better than 20th-century
socialists and communists have done. Their solution was to reduce the powers of
patronage of the central government bureaucracy and its ability to control the
agenda of the legislature. They were defeated, in Britain by the Tory revival,
in the early US by federalism; republicans in France were defeated by
Bonapartism. But their ideas echo in Marx’s writings on the Commune, in Marx’s
and Engels’ attacks on Lassalleanism, and in Engels’ critique of the Erfurt
programme.
This understanding enables us to formulate a core political
minimum platform for the participation of communists in a government. The
key is to replace the illusory idea of ‘All power to the soviets’ and the empty
one of ‘All power to the Communist Party’ with the original Marxist idea of the
undiluted democratic republic, or ‘extreme democracy’, as the form of the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
This implies:
l universal military training and
service, democratic political and trade union rights within the military, and
the right to keep and bear arms;
l election and recallability of all
public officials; public officials to be on an average skilled workers’ wage;
l abolition of official secrecy laws
and of private rights of copyright and confidentiality;
l self-government in the localities:
ie, the removal of powers of central government control and patronage and
abolition of judicial review of the decisions of elected bodies;
l abolition of constitutional
guarantees of the rights of private property and freedom of trade.
There are certainly other aspects; more in the CPGB’s Draft
programme. These are merely points that are particularly salient to me when
writing. A workers’ government policy as a united front policy would have to
combine these issues, summed up as the struggle for ‘the undiluted democratic
republic’ or ‘extreme democracy’, with salient immediate (not
‘transitional’) demands, such as (for Britain now) the abolition of the
anti-union laws, an end to PFI, the renationalisation of rail and the
utilities.
Without commitment to such a minimum platform, communists
should not accept governmental responsibility. Contrary to Trotsky’s argument
on Saxony, whether the conditions are ‘revolutionary’ or not makes no
difference to this choice. To accept governmental responsibility as a minority
under conditions of revolutionary crisis is, if anything, worse than
doing so in ‘peaceful times’: a crisis demands urgent solutions, and communists
can only offer these solutions from opposition.
What we should be willing to do - if we had MPs - is to put
forward for enactment individual elements of our minimum programme, and to
support individual proposals - say, of a Labour government - which are
consistent with our minimum programme.
The point of such a policy would be to force the supporters
of the Labour left in Britain, leftwingers in the coalitionist parties in
Europe, to confront the choice between loyalty to the state-party and
loyalty to the working class. But in order to apply such a policy we would
first have to have a Communist Party commanding 10%-20% of the popular vote.
As I argued in the last article in this series, it is
illusory to suppose that the policy of the united front can be applied as a
substitute for overcoming the division of the Marxist left into competing sects
(Weekly Worker May 11). Without a united Communist Party, the various
‘workers’ government’ and ‘workers’ party’ formulations of the Trotskyists are
at best empty rhetoric, at worst excuses for a diplomatic policy towards the
official lefts.
We saw in the fourth article in this series that the
Kautskyan centre, which deliberately refused coalitions and government
participation, was able to build up powerful independent workers’ parties (Weekly
Worker April 13). In the sixth article we saw that the post-war communist
parties could turn into Kautskyan parties, and as such could - even if they
were small - play an important role in developing class consciousness and the
mass workers’ movement (Weekly Worker April 27). This possibility was
available to them precisely because, though they sought to participate
in government coalitions, the bourgeoisie and the socialists did not trust
their loyalty to the state and used every means possible to exclude them from
national government.
The Kautskyans were right on a fundamental point. Communists
can only take power when we have won majority support for working class
rule through extreme democracy. ‘Revolutionary crisis’ may accelerate processes
of changing political allegiance, but it does not alter this fundamental point
or offer a way around it. There are no short cuts, whether by
coalitionism or by the mass strike.
The present task of communists/socialists is therefore not
to fight for an alternative government. It is to fight to build an
alternative opposition: one which commits itself unambiguously to
self-emancipation of the working class through extreme democracy, as opposed
to all the loyalist parties.
Notes:
1. www.marxists.org.uk/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics.htm
2. In First five years of the Communist International
Vol 2, www.marxists.org.uk/archive/trotsky/works/1924/ffyci-2/24.htm
3. www.marxists.org.uk/archive/trotsky/works/1938-tp/index.htm#Workers_Government.
First Published in weekly Worker – May 2006