A strange thing happened on January 28.
Socialist Worker published a report of the 16th Congress of
the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR, but more commonly abbreviated
to ‘the Ligue’). The report, by Alex Callinicos, offers an account of the views
of the different platforms in the Ligue debating where it should go in the next
year, and reports the percentage votes some of them obtained and the fact that
Platform 1, the outgoing leadership majority, won just less than 50% of the
total votes cast.
It is a strange thing to happen because Socialist Worker
has a long history of pretending to be the far left’s Daily Mirror, a
paper which addresses the broad masses. SWPers would say that these masses are
not interested in the internal affairs of far left organisations. In reality,
of course, Socialist Worker’s paid sales are not much above the SWP’s
claimed membership: the paper’s Mirror style leads it to preach
low-grade banalities to the converted. In this context, for Socialist Worker
to publish Callinicos’s report of the Ligue congress is surprising. It is also
- if it proves to be the beginning of a trend - a major step forward.
The account is, quite properly, from a slant given by the
Socialist Workers Party leadership’s current political views. Perhaps less
satisfactorily, it is only partially informative. It offers a substantial
critique of Platform 1, and a brief account of the view of Platform 4, which
includes the SWP’s co-thinkers. The other platforms only get side swipes which
do not really tell us much about their views: Platform 3 “see the LCR as a
catalyst in a realignment of the left involving elements of both the CP and SP,
and some at least don’t rule out LCR participation in another ‘plural left’
government,” and Platform 2 brought out the “sectarian logic” of Platform 1’s
arguments (by being sectarians).
The Ligue’s own report in the Fourth International’s International
Viewpoint webzine (www.interna- tionalviewpoint.org) tells us only that
minorities existed, not what they said, and is even more opaque (it should be
said that the documents of the several platforms are available in French on the
Ligue’s website: www.Ligue-rouge.org/rubriquecongres.php-
3?id_rubrique=144).
The SWP has added to our knowledge of debates in the Ligue
in another way too. The January 2006 issue of the International Socialist
Tendency Discussion Bulletin (IST DB) put out by the SWP’s
‘international’ includes translations of three pieces on the question of
revolutionary strategy from the Ligue’s theoretical journal Critique
Communiste and a comment on them by Callinicos (www.istend-
ency.net/pdf/ISTbulletin7.pdf).
The immediate issue is simple: should the Ligue participate,
without preconditions, in discussions whose aim is to try to achieve a unitary candidacy
of ‘the left’ in the presidential elections in 2007?
The context is that in the 2002 elections, there was no
unitary ‘left’ candidate. In the first round the Socialist Party candidate,
Lionel Jospin, did badly; and the Communist Party (PCF) candidate, Robert Hue,
was out-polled by both the candidates of the far left - Olivier Besancenot of
the Ligue and Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvrière. Under the French
constitution, the effect of the divided left vote, and, more especially, the
poor performance of the SP and PCF, was that Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far right
Front National went through to the second round. The bulk of the left wound up
voting for the centre-right candidate, Jacques Chirac, in order to ‘keep Le Pen
out’.
There are three problems with the idea that the Ligue should
participate in such a project. Two of these are matters of assessment of the
political situation - the character of the ‘Plural Left’ governments which
preceded Chirac, as influencing the 2002 defeat, and the European question. The
third is a strategic matter and by no means unique to the Ligue: under what
conditions should communists participate in coalition governments formed on the
basis of the electoral institutions of the existing capitalist state (in
France, the 5th Republic)? Equally, when should they support or participate in
electoral coalitions which are aimed to create such governments?
The ‘Plural Left’ governments were in substance not
dissimilar to Blairism with a bit more left rhetoric. They accepted the general
framework of ‘national competitiveness’, and launched a series of attacks on
the rights and interests of the French working class. The poor electoral
performance of the SP and CP in 2002 reflected the fact that the policy of
their government was discredited among a large portion of working class voters.
It is unlikely that enough time has passed for this to be forgotten, and if a
‘united left’ candidacy offers a warmed-over version of the same policy in
2007, it is likely to receive the same negative response as in 2002.
The European aspect consists in the victory of the ‘no’ camp
in the May 2005 referendum in France on the EU constitutional treaty. Though a
substantial part of the ‘no’ vote came from the nationalist right, the result
was widely and rightly perceived as a rejection of the neoliberal character of
the treaty.
The SP was split down the middle on the referendum, and many
leftists held out the hope that the split would become permanent and the ‘left
no’ camp as a whole could be regrouped as a left force rejecting neoliberalism.
In the event the SP leaders decided at their November 2005 conference to hang
together rather than separately. Even the SP faction led by former LCR
oppositionist Gérard Filoche clings to the unity of the SP, as can be seen in
his comments on the Ligue congress (in the International Viewpoint report).
The opaque discussion in the Ligue takes the form of
disagreement on the interpretation of these two issues. Does the threat of the
far right override the political bankruptcy of the past ‘social-liberal’
governments? How much political space, if any, is opened up by the ‘no’
victory in May 2005?
However, judgments on these two questions are ultimately
secondary. Such judgments are inevitably formulated within strategic frameworks,
even if these are unspoken. The significance of the Critique Communiste materials
translated by the IST DB is that, if also in an opaque way, they open up
the question of strategic frameworks.
The core strategic question is the meaning of the division
between ‘reformists’ and ‘revolutionaries’. It is posed to the LCR because the
Ligue has been invited to participate in what is in substance a proposal for a
coalition to fight for a government which would pursue what have traditionally
been seen as ‘reformist’ objectives. It is posed to the Fourth International
more generally because for some time it has supported and participated in the
creation of parties and coalitions which, in Callinicos’s phrase, “leave open
the question of reform and revolution”, such as the Brazilian Workers Party
and, in Europe, Rifondazione Comunista, the Scottish Socialist Party, etc.
However, the experience of Brazil showed, and so in
different ways do the debates in Rifondazione and in the German
proto-Linkspartei, there are present-day choices facing the left about policy,
government and coalitions. And these choices still leave sharp differences.
On the one side are those who are willing, for the sake of
lesser-evilism or marginal advantages to the oppressed, to administer the
existing capitalist nation-state as part of the existing international state
system without fundamental changes. They are therefore prepared to form
coalitions with supporters of these systems, in which these supporters can veto
policies which are ‘too leftwing’.
On the other side are those who insist that this policy is
an illusion which merely prepares the ground for disillusionment among the
masses, the advance of the far right, and new further-right centre-right governments.
From this perspective, making fundamental changes is the priority of any
socialist government, and perhaps such a government could only come to power
through a ‘revolutionary rupture’. Only small and dispersed minorities refuse
any coalitions at all, but a significant minority would hold the view that a
coalition in which Blair, Schröder, Prodi or Fabius calls the shots is not
worth having and a stance of militant opposition - even if it means militant
opposition to a government of the right - is preferable.
This is the context in which the Critique Communiste
documents and Callinicos’s response address the ‘strategic questions’.
The first two documents translated are by Antoine Artous,
the editor of Critique Communiste. The first, titled ‘The LCR and the
left: some strategic questions’, is an ‘I want to open the discussion’ sort of
document. Artous tells us that the Ligue through the 1970s operated on a dual
axis of ‘the united front’ (seeking united action of the broad movement,
including unification of the French party-led trade union confederations) and
‘revolutionary unity’. The united front policy “ran into ... problems, such as
the issue of a ‘workers’ government’” and “developing a policy on the
governments formed by the communist parties and the social democrats”.
The ‘revolutionary unity’ side is discreetly left
undeveloped: the truth is that the Ligue’s efforts in this direction were
pretty minimal.
Artous takes the opportunity to insist that the Ligue did
not merely take the Russian Revolution as a model, but “intended to revive the
work of elaboration carried out by the non-Stalinist Comintern [ie, the first
four congresses of the Comintern, 1919-22] and then by Trotsky and others ...
by relating it to current experience (Chile, Portugal, etc).” But “the Ligue
still saw the most significant split in the workers’ movement ... as being the
split between ‘reformists’ and ‘revolutionaries’”.
This approach is obsolete, Artous argues, because “the
current period is characterised by the end of the historical cycle which began
with October 1917”. Hence, recycling Lenin’s State and revolution (etc)
is not enough: “completely rethinking a strategy of social emancipation” is
what is called for.
Artous claims that the Ligue in the 1970s had, and has now
lost, a “strategic hypothesis”: that of the “insurrectionary general strike”.
It is necessary to reaffirm that there must be a “revolutionary rupture”, but
to admit that this does not amount to a strategy. In place of this strategy,
which it shared, the SWP has put an ultra-minimum programme (Callinicos’s An
anti-capitalist manifesto) coupled with abstract references to “the
revolution”. This is an attempt to con the masses into making the revolution
(Artous’ formulation is a little politer).
What is called for is a reforged transitional programme.
Artous insists that a full programme will require experiences of struggle, but
suggests two axes: (1) “the radicalisation of democracy, on the theme of
democracy in its purest form”; and (2) “the struggle against the
commodification of the world” - ie, to put it in less elevating terms, against
privatisation and cuts in welfare provisions.
He concludes that “it is not simply a case of rebuilding a
workers’ movement ... based on ‘class foundations’: this approach must dovetail
with an ‘alliance’ policy which involves forming a social and political bloc
with the ... ‘social movements’”. The kind of new political force required will
have to (1) be anti-capitalist and socialist, and (2) “clearly differentiate itself
from social-liberalism”. This latter point means that there can be no practical
unity between those who support and those who oppose creating a government
which includes the right wing of the SP.
There are three striking features of Artous’ argument. The
first is that, although it purports to take into account the history of
the Trotskyist movement and of the Ligue in particular, it in fact merely
recounts it in order to set it on one side as not relevant to current
conditions. It is also not completely accurate. The Ligue’s policy in the 1970s
was informed by the European perspectives of the 10th World Congress of the
Mandelite Fourth International. The characterisation of this policy as expressing
a strategy of “insurrectionary general strike” is a half-truth. Its core was,
in fact, the struggle to develop proto-soviet forms, both in the course of the
day to day class struggle and under revolutionary conditions. It was argued
that through the experience of proto-soviet and soviet forms the proletarian
masses could go beyond the SPs and CPs. In the 1974-75 Portuguese revolution
this policy failed disastrously to provide any guide to action on the question
of government. The Ligue has thus been deprived of its strategy not because
conditions have changed, but because this strategy was proved by experiment to
be wrong in the conditions for which it was designed.
Rather similarly, Artous insists that the Ligue grounded
itself on the early Comintern: but he shows no sign of having actually read
critically the documents of the early Comintern or being willing to pass
judgement on what was right and what was wrong in these documents.
The second striking feature is that Artous is stuck with the
Trotskyist idea of a ‘transitional programme’. He has a better idea of what
such a programme might be than some other users of it: ie, that it is to grow
out of existing objective conditions (not out of what is currently
popular, like the 35-hour week) and to point towards, in Artous’ phrase,
“radical transformation of the system” (Trotsky, more bluntly and slightly less
economistically, said that it must point towards the conquest of political
power by the proletariat).
But here too Artous is unwilling actually to engage with the
history. The 1938 Transitional programme postulated that capitalism was
in its death agony and the immediate needs of the masses could only be met by
radical socialisation. It was this that made a ‘transitional’ programme, as
opposed to minimum and maximum programmes, appropriate. The ‘transitional’ core
in fact derived from the trade union programme of the Fourth Congress of the
Comintern, which was in turn based on German militant trade unionists’
responses to the conditions of acute economic disruption towards the end of the
1914-18 war. In fact, the ‘death agony’ was that of the British world hegemony,
not of capitalism; and in 1939-45 the belligerents rapidly introduced systems
of planning and rationing which prevented the economic chaos of 1914-18. The Transitional
programme had no purchase on events.
False in its own time, the Transitional programme has
provided no guide to action for the Trotskyists ever since. Instead, they have
quite properly created minimum programmes - but usually called them
‘transitional’. Because the core of the 1938 programme was a trade union
programme, these minimum programmes have characteristically had a strongly
economistic cast. Artous has made an important step forward in understanding
that the struggle for “democracy in its purest form” is critical to the
proletariat as a class taking power. But he then fails to develop this insight,
focussing instead on the “struggle against commodification”: ie, (potentially)
more economism.
Thirdly, when Artous discusses ‘alliance policy’, he
misunderstands radically what the proletariat is as a class in Marxist theory.
That is, in Marxist theory the proletariat is the whole class which is
dependent on the wage fund, not merely the employed workers. It is the
proletariat’s separation from (ie, non-ownership of) the means of
production which makes it potentially the bearer of socialism/communism, not
the employed workers’ connection to the means of production in the form of the
workplaces.
In insisting that the ‘social movements’ are separate allies
of the class movement, Artous on the one hand ignores the roots of these
movements in processes of proletarianisation. On the other, he distorts the
idea of the workers’ class movement into a misshapen, syndicalist-economist
form. The sort of workers’ class political movement which the Second
International built was one which organised, through diverse and differentiated
organisational forms, on every issue and in every area of social life,
including socialist education, socialist credit unions, choirs, cycle clubs,
and so on. Today we need to fight to rebuild a class political movement in that
sense, not impoverished ‘pure trade unionism’.
This error on the nature of class underlay the syndicalist
character of the Ligue’s and Mandelites’ (and the British SWP’s) strategic
perspectives in the 1970s. It now has effects which threaten to amount to a
repeat of the ‘alliance’ ideas of the British Eurocommunists, who ended up
destroying their party. Those who will not learn from history - and Artous on
the evidence of this article will not - are condemned to repeat it.
The second piece by Artous is a critique of Thomas Coutrot’s
Democracy against capitalism (Paris 2005), and Coutrot’s intervention in
Critique Communiste in the debate on the Ligue’s 2005 draft manifesto.
Without having read Coutrot’s book, we have to read Artous’ critique for what
it adds to our understanding of Artous’ strategic conception.
Artous indicates at the outset his agreement with two of
Coutrot’s fundamental views: (1) that after Stalinism and neoliberalism “only a
project aimed at the radicalisation of democracy could refound an alternative
global perspective”; and (2) “the task is to construct ‘a historic social bloc’
(in the sense used by Gramsci) through the struggle against capitalist
globalisation”.
Artous’ disagreements with Coutrot are less clearly
presented. It seems that Artous thinks Coutrot believes that the struggle for
democracy need not confront the question of ownership of the means of
production. In Artous’ view, on the contrary, the introduction of (eg)
democratic workers’ control would in itself entrench upon, or at least
radically change, the right of ownership. This claim recurs throughout the
piece and returns in its conclusion.
Coutrot is also a fan of cooperatives and similar measures
from below of self-organisation of those excluded from the charmed circle of
the full-time permanent employees. It should be remembered that activities of
this sort were common to the pre-1914 socialist movement, including the
Bolsheviks. But both Coutrot (as reported by Artous), tentatively, and Artous,
more sharply, claim that there is no space for such initiatives in the
‘advanced capitalist’ countries. No reason is given. In fact, the abstention of
the left from such initiatives has left the field to the clergy and the
charitable poverty lobby NGOs. It is hardly surprising in this context that
there is a significant revival of religion across the ‘advanced countries’, if
not yet as strong as in the US and the ‘third world’.
Coutrot is presented by Artous as hostile, in the name of
democracy and worker or worker-citizen control, to statisation of economic
activities. Artous insists, on the contrary, that in several areas statisation
is or may be necessary. What is truly extraordinary about this exchange is a
silence. Neither Coutrot (as reported by Artous) nor Artous has things to say
about democratising the state: freedom of information and speech and an
end to state and commercial secrets, workers’ militia, trial by jury and
flattening of judicial hierarchies, abolition of hereditary (monarchies) and
elective (presidencies) systems of one-person rule, compulsory rotation of
officials, and so on.
The unavoidable conclusion: both Coutrot and Artous are beginning
to think about democracy; but neither has actually broken from the
deep-going economism of the organised left.
The third piece, by Cédric Durand, is adorned with flow
diagrams (presumably derived from a Powerpoint presentation ...) which add
nothing. Durand’s argument is a more systematic and more extreme version of
conclusions which might be drawn from some of the points made by Artous.
Durand starts with a quite correct point. Since the
beginning of the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ the current world order,
together with the states and elites which make it up, has suffered a
considerable loss of legitimacy. But this loss of legitimacy has not issued in
a revival of the organisations of the workers’ movement and the left.
He notes that “the mistakes about governmental participation
made by members of the Fourth International in Brazil show how hard it is to
take a position when the question of governmental participation becomes
explicit”. It is unclear whether this is intended as a criticism of the
Democracia Socialista majority who have remained in the Workers Party and the
government (the view after long hesitation taken by the Fourth International),
or of their opponents (which would imply that Durand accepts the idea of
participating in a ‘social-liberal’ government).
The point is nonetheless sound. Any political party which
wins significant voting support (and in political crises, even those which do
not) is forced to confront the question of governmental coalitions. This
problem has shipwrecked all the Trotskyist organisations which have approached
having a mass base (eg, the Sri Lankan Lanka Sama Samaja Party, Bolivian
Partido Obrero Revolucionario) and several other smaller ones.
It is now clear, Durand argues, that the failure of hostility
to capitalism to translate into support for the organised left (and the
ascendancy of anarchist ideas in the anti-globalisation movement itself) “are
not merely conjunctural developments, but are the product of profound
scepticism about the ability of political organisations to carry through the
process of social transformation”. Put more simply, lots of people are fed up
with capitalism, but they do not trust the far left (or moderate left) groups.
Durand restates the Ligue’s old strategy of the “insurrectionary
general strike” or “strategy of dual power” slightly more accurately than
Artous, without commenting on it. He goes on to give an explanation of the
failure of this policy which, even more clearly than Artous’ comments on
alliances, is grounded on Eurocommunist arguments initially developed by
academics around the ‘official’ CPGB.
In the first place, the communist and third-worldist
strategies were founded on an idea of the “homogeneity of the oppressed” which
was “reductionist”. This in turn led to “substitutionism” in which spaces for
self-organisation were displaced by party hierarchy. The result is the seizure
of power, followed by “pragmatic” adaptation to the needs of state management:
ie, Stalinism. Secondly, there is “growing socio-economic complexity and
fragmentation”. This has had the effect of undermining self-identification in
terms of class, as well as weakening the trade union movement. The “traditional
labour movement” thus tends to decline. Both arguments are stale Eurocommunist
crap familiar in this country from the 1980s writings of Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart
Hall, and so on.
Durand’s strategic hypotheses to respond to this situation
follow. He argues that, instead of a strategy of ‘preparing for’ the
insurrectionary general strike, the process of social transformation should be
extended over a prolonged period of struggles. There should be “an immediate
policy consistent with its purposes”, which implies the construction in present
struggles of forms of self-management, etc; but also that simple demands for
increased purchasing power are not enough. Struggle should be seen as a form of
emancipation in itself. There should be a “strategic commitment free of any
ambiguity to non-violence”.
Secondly, strategy should move “from the decisive battle to
the multiplicity of strategic spaces”. Following management theorist Alfred
Hirschman’s 1970 models of responses to the decline of firms, Durand proposes
three sorts of “strategic spaces”: “exit”, which means cooperatives, etc, in
“zones abandoned by capitalism” (?); “voice”, which means strikes, protests and
NGO lobbying; and “loyalty”, which is expressed in a commitment to play by the
rules of the political game. “The electoral field,” says Durand, “is indeed the
legitimate arena to define the orientation of the political leadership.”
Eurocommunist reasonings thus lead to Eurocommunist
conclusions. French comrades should be willing to look across the Channel for
once (I know it is never something that comes easy to them) and see what has
become of the ex-CP ‘Democratic Left’ built on this strategic orientation.
Callinicos’s commentary on the French documents offers us
three elements. The first is an assessment of the international political
situation. Here Callinicos claims that there is a process of radicalisation,
and the far left are significant players in it, but that for it to develop into
more the masses have to move. This assessment allows him to evade the
fundamental point made by all the LCR authors: namely that the evolution of the
political situation since the later 1990s has shown that the radicalisation
against global neoliberalism has not reflected itself positively in growth of
the workers’ movement and the organised (‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’) left.
On the contrary, Callinicos points to instances of relative growth of far left
votes which he himself explains in terms of the crisis of the social democracy.
The organised left has continued to decline, but trade unions and the
traditional mass workers’ parties have declined faster than the far
left, leaving the far left relatively stronger. The 2002 votes in the French
presidential elections are a clear example.
The second element is a critique, primarily of Durand, on the
basis that the policy proposed is warmed over Eurocommunism - as I have
indicated in my own comments on Durand (though Callinicos is a little more
diplomatic). In this context, Callinicos insists that at the end of the day the
capitalist state will resist socialist transformation using force, and that
socialists have to be prepared for - at some point - a forcible confrontation
with this state with a view to breaking it up and creating a new political
order.
It is certainly true that there can be no socialism unless
the capitalist state’s monopoly of organised armed force is destroyed. It is likely
that this would at some stage involve a forcible confrontation. However, if the
political crisis is deep enough, it is by no means impossible that the ranks of
the military would dissolve or go over in their majority to the revolution.
This certainly happened in 1917 and more recently in Cuba and Nicaragua, and
came close to happening in the French événements of 1968 and in
Portugal. In this case the capitalist class and the state core would have grave
difficulties in reconstructing an internal military force to coerce the
working class back into obedience.
Conversely, the question as to whether the workers’ movement
could win a forcible confrontation is quite plainly to be answered, not by
militarisation of the organisational structure of the proletarian movement in
advance, but by the ability to improvise armed forces on the basis of broad
mass support once it became obvious that a forcible confrontation was inevitable.
This is one of the real lessons of 1917, and it is, in fact, inconsistent with
the conclusions the Comintern drew in 1921 about the ‘epoch of wars and
revolutions’ requiring the Communist Party to have a military character.
Callinicos simply fails to address these questions, just as
he evades the problem of broad mistrust of the far left.
Callinicos insists that the problem of the ‘revolutionary
subject’ is not new and consists, in substance, of members of the working class
not identifying themselves as workers. A correct and very helpful point
follows: “It has always required a complex process of struggle, organisation
and political intervention for a particular working class to start to imagine
itself as more than an aggregation of wage labourers, as a political subject
with a common identity and interests.”
But then, of course, the question is: what sort of
organisation and political intervention could begin to re-establish class
political consciousness?
Callinicos defends his 10-point programme from An
anti-capitalist manifesto, and argues that Artous’ criticisms of it as
minimalist are either a discourse of Ligue members distancing themselves from
the SWP, or reflect the Trotskyist view that “the programme has a kind of
magical quality inherent in its demands connecting present struggles with the
overthrow of capitalism”. This is a legitimate critique of Artous. It is no
answer to the objection - not made by Artous - that Callinicos’s 10-point
programme is wholly economistic, containing nothing other than ‘defence of
civil liberties’ on the struggle for democracy.
Finally, he returns to his starting point: in various
European left electoral formations ‘revolutionary Marxists’ can play a pivotal
role. The Ligue’s approach to the question of regroupment in the wake of the
‘no’ campaign is a “passive, almost quietistic attitude that treats the outcome
of struggles as settled before they have begun”.
Artous, Coutrot (as reported by Artous) and Durand are
asking genuine strategic questions, even if their answers are in several ways
misconceived. Callinicos evades these questions. He does so first by a
combination of arguments about the political situation. These amount to the
idea that the traditional far-left strategy (to which the SWP still formally
adheres) is not disproved, but ‘our time may yet come’. The second element of
evasion is his reassertion of the point that it is likely at the end of the day
that there will have to be a forcible confrontation with the capitalist state (‘reform
or revolution’).
Callinicos presents the choice between ‘reform’ and
‘revolution’ as a choice about forcible confrontation with the capitalist
state. But if this issue was really the core of his strategic argument,
a key policy conclusion would follow: revolutionaries must fight for arming the
working class and disarming the capitalist class. In the concrete, this means
fighting (a) for the universal right to keep and bear arms and against ‘gun
control’; (b) for universal military service and a popular militia to replace
the standing armed forces; and (c) for full democratic, political and trade
union rights in the existing armed forces. No such policy makes its appearance
even in the SWP’s more ‘revolutionary’ output, let alone in its electoral policy,
either through the Socialist Alliance or more recently through Respect.
What is left of policy conclusions resulting from
‘revolution’ is just one - that identified by Durand as “substitutionism”. It
is the degutted remnant in the SWP’s ideas of the Comintern’s 1921 ‘Resolution
on the organisation of the communist parties’. In this view, since a revolution
entails forcible confrontation, it requires a party “of the Bolshevik type”,
defined as one which (a) has a top-down, militaristic structure and (b) remains
‘pure’ by organisational separation from the pro-capitalist right
wing of the workers’ movement, as opposed to political confrontation with
their ideas. This idea was already false in 1921 and has had disastrous
consequences ever since. This is the underlying ideology which sanctifies the
character of the SWP, as a bureaucratic dictatorship over its own ranks, and as
a sect which poisons everything it touches with control-freakery.
Callinicos’s evasions thus indicate in themselves that the
French authors are tackling real and profoundly important questions. To
understand in a more fundamental way what is wrong with both the strategic
ideas of the French authors and with Callinicos’s, it will be necessary to look
back in a bit more depth at how the ‘strategic question’ has evolved. This will
enable us to return, with more solid backing for concrete political judgments,
to the question of coalition governments and coalitions which seek to create
governments.
First published in Weekly Worker – February 2006