The question of coalition governments has become an
important subject of discussion in the European and wider left. The International
Socialist Tendency Discussion Bulletin has translated from the Ligue
Communiste Révolutionnaire’s journal Critique Communiste some articles
on questions of strategy, which raise important issues for today’s workers’
movement and far left, and which can inform this discussion.
In the first article I outlined the positions proposed by
Antoine Artous and Cédric Durand and commented on Alex Callinicos’s critique of
them, and made some specific criticisms of all three. In this article, and
another to follow, I propose to return to the history of the question of
‘revolutionary strategy’. Once this history has been grasped more clearly, it
will be possible to come back to the question of electoral coalitions and
coalition governments.
The essence of what is discussed as ‘revolutionary strategy’
is its long-term character: it is the frame within which we think about
how to achieve our goals over the course of a series of activities or
struggles, each of which has its own tactics.
The core of the relevant strategic discussions is those of
Marx and Engels and their early co-thinkers and of the Second International
down to the crisis of 1914-18. There are two reasons for this. The first is
that in some respects our times are closer to theirs than they are to the
‘short 20th century’. On the one hand, the late 19th and early 20th century was
both more ‘globalised’ and more dominated by financial capitals than the period
of imperial blocs and wars, and the cold war, which followed it. On the other,
the first part of the period was one of the scattered forces of the workers’
movement beginning to pull themselves together, either from a low start, or
after the defeat of the Paris Commune and of the First International; and this,
again, is more like our own times than the period of massively dominant
socialist and communist parties.
Secondly, I said in the first article that Artous is wrong
to dispose of 1917-91 by saying that “the current period is characterised by the
end of the historical cycle which began with October 1917.” He is wrong because
we do not start from scratch. But in another sense he is not wrong.
The truth is that 1918-21 saw the defeat of both the
historic strategic concept of Bolshevism (‘democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry’) and those of Trotsky (‘workers’ government
supported by the poor peasantry’) and Luxemburg (that the movement, set free,
would solve its own problems). The concrete form of the defeat was that Russia
remained isolated.
What happened instead was to render concrete the 1850s
warnings of Marx and Engels against the premature seizure of power in Germany,
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, 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 1991. They are proved by 1991, and the fate of the other ‘socialist
countries’, to be a strategic blind alley.
When you are radically lost it becomes necessary to retrace
your steps. In the present case, this means retracing our steps to the strategic
debates of the early workers’ movement and the Second International, which
defined the strategic choices available to socialists in the early 20th
century, and in this sense led to the blind alley of 1918-91.
Marxism as a political position makes some very simple
claims, which are very concisely expressed in the preamble to the 1880 Programme
of the Parti Ouvrier, drafted by Marx:
“That the emancipation of the productive class is that of
all human beings without distinction of sex or race;
“That the producers can be free only when they are in
possession of the means of production (land, factories, ships, banks, credit);
“That there are only two forms under which the means of
production can belong to them:
(1) The individual form which has never existed in a general
state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;
(2) The collective form, the material and intellectual
elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist
society;
“Considering that this collective appropriation can arise
only from the revolutionary action of the productive class - or proletariat -
organised in a distinct political party;
“That such an organisation must be pursued by all the means
the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage which will
thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now
into an instrument of emancipation ...” (text from
www.revolu-tionary-history.co.uk/otherdox/Whatnext/POprog.html).
This line can be seen as a strategy from two different
angles. It is a strategy for the emancipation of the working class, through
collective action for communism. It is a strategy for the emancipation of “all
human beings without distinction of sex or race”, or for communism, through the
emancipation of the working class. This single/double strategy is the long-term
goal pursued by Marx and Engels from the time of the Communist manifesto
on. The rest of their work - Marx’s critique of political economy, the
development of ‘historical materialism,’ etc - consists of arguments for
this strategy. The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier contains a single
additional element: that the proletariat must be “organised in a distinct
political party”.
A ‘Marxist’ party, then, consists in principle of nothing
more than a party which is committed to the ideas that the working class
can only emancipate itself - and humanity - through struggling for communism,
and that the struggle for communism can only be victorious through the action
of the working class.
I use ‘communism’ here not to mean the ideas of
‘official’ communism or even the early Comintern, but rather the
counterposition made much earlier by Marx and Engels in the Communist
manifesto: communism implies overcoming the state, nationality and the
family, as opposed to ‘socialism’, which is statist and nationalist and can be
feudal-reactionary.
To call a party ‘Marxist’ thus does not in the least entail
that it should be, for example, a Trotskyist party. A party which held to the
strategic line of Kautsky’s Road to power (without the political
conclusions of Kautsky’s theoretical statism, which flowered more fully in his
later work) would still be a Marxist party.
There are, however, two additional elements of strategy
which can be found in Marx and Engels’ writings, which follow from the
fundamental claims.
The first concerns the question of the state. Both Marx’s
famous and Engels’ less famous critiques of the 1875 Gotha programme of the
unification of the German socialist parties are emphatic that the workers’
movement must not propose dependence on the existing state or the “free state”.
It should be emphasised that this is not a matter of making the
overthrow of the existing state the precondition for all else. The Programme
of the Parti Ouvrier mostly consists of partial demands consistent with the
survival of capitalism. Both Marx and Engels, in criticising the Gotha
programme, insist that compromises of expression for the sake of avoiding
prosecution are perfectly acceptable; the fundamental problem they see in the
draft in this respect is that it miseducates the workers by promoting dependence
on the state (state aid, state education, etc).
The second is that the proletarian class is an international
class and the proletarian movement is necessarily an international movement.
This was again a strong strain in the critiques of the Gotha programme and was
already present in the Communist manifesto. It follows logically from
the international character of ... capitalism.
Thus Marx in the Critique of the Gotha programme: “It
is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class
must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the
immediate arena of its struggle - insofar as its class struggle is national,
not in substance, but, as the Communist Manifesto says, ‘in form’. But
the ‘framework of the present-day national state’ - for instance, the German
empire - is itself, in its turn, economically ‘within the framework’ of the
world market, politically ‘within the framework’ of the system of states. Every
businessman knows that German trade is at the same time foreign trade, and the
greatness of Herr Bismarck consists, to be sure, precisely in his pursuing a
kind of international policy.”
Beyond these points, for Marx and Engels and their
co-thinkers, all else is tactics, whether it is trade union struggles, standing
in elections, legality and illegality, insurrections, street-fighting and/or
guerrilla warfare.
Durand’s arguments, and in a certain sense those of Artous
on ‘alliances’, suggest that the core claim of Marxism - that the struggle for
socialism is the struggle for the emancipation of the working class and that
the emancipation of the working class can only be achieved through the struggle
for socialism - is false. Instead, the struggle for the emancipation of the
working class is part only of the struggle for human liberation:
“Relations of oppression or exploitation arising from patriarchy, humanity’s
predatory conduct towards the rest of the biosphere, racism, the denial of
political and individual freedom, choice of sexual orientation or minority
cultures” are equally important and cannot be “mechanically transferred back to
the resolution of the central economic conflict” (Durand).
Durand adds a further argument that the “growing complexity
and fragmentation of societies” leads inter alia to “a weakening of the
feeling of belonging to the working class and a spatial deconstruction of
labour, which makes more fragile the forms of organisation of the traditional
labour movement and encourages a decline in unionisation.”
It is possible to respond to these arguments by pointing out
that working class self-identification is as much a subjective as an objective
reality, as Callinicos does, and by pointing to the political futility
displayed in Britain by supporters of these ideas, as I did in my first
article. It can be added that the “growing fragmentation of labour” has not
shown any tendency to recreate genuine petty family production: on the
contrary, this continues globally to retreat. What it has recreated are
the conditions of widespread employment in small workplaces, etc - under which
Chartism, the early trade union movement, the First International and the early
socialist parties were created.
The implication then is not ‘good-bye to the working class’,
but, rather than the means of struggle need to change, they need to
shift from workplace collective organisation to district
collective organisation. It is also that trade unions need to become again - as
Engels called them - an alliance of the employed and the unemployed; and one
which performs significant welfare functions rather than simply being an
instrument of collective bargaining on wages and conditions.
At a more fundamental level of theory, the authors of the Programme
of the Parti Ouvrier could neither have claimed that “the emancipation of
the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or
race”, nor that the working class needs a “distinct political party” if
they had believed that the working class is what Durand and Artous apparently
believe it is. It is not the employed workers’ strength at the point of
production which animates their belief that the key to socialism is the
struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat and vice versa. On the
contrary, it is the proletariat’s separation from the means of production,
the impossibility of restoring small-scale family production, and the
proletariat’s consequent need for collective, voluntary organisation
which lead Marx and Engels to suppose that the proletariat is a potential
‘universal class’, that its struggles are capable of leading to socialism and
to a truly human society.
This is both a positive judgment and a negative judgment. On
the side of the positive judgment, it is true that the defeats the workers’
movement has suffered since the new ‘roll-back’ offensive of capital began in
the late 1970s give superficial reasons for doubt and despair. But even amid
these defeats and in defeated struggles, the working class has shown the
ability to draw in behind it all the oppressed and exploited in struggles like
the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Britain, while new movements - often unexpected
by the left - have arisen and shaken local states, as, again in the 1980s, in
Brazil, South Korea and South Africa. These, too, have run into the sand. But
the whole history of the workers’ movement - before Marx and Engels as well as
after - is not one of continuous advance but of advance and retreat. The
present retreats do not in themselves give grounds for supposing ‘good-bye to
the working class’.
The negative judgment consists in the proposition that,
however weak the workers’ movement, general human emancipation on the basis of
petty family property and production is impossible and hence the idea of this
or that section of the petty proprietors, or the undifferentiated ‘people’,
serving as a revolutionary subject is illusory. This judgment was founded on
the whole history of radical movements down to Marx and Engels’ time. It has
been emphatically confirmed in the 20th century - by, precisely, the defeats
suffered by the workers’ movement through submerging itself in a
‘worker-peasant alliance’, ‘national movement’ or ‘broad democratic alliance’.
The most serious of these defeats is Stalinism itself.
Stalinism did not take and hold power in the name of the dictatorship of
the proletariat over the other classes. It took it in the name of the worker-peasant
alliance and held it in the name of a ‘socialism’, in which the obvious
existence of classes in the Stalinist states was denied.
The negative judgment is also demonstrated in a different
way by the fact that the ‘social movements’ on which Artous and Durand place so
much emphasis are themselves a broken reed. The ‘women’s movement’ in the US
and Britain, where it began, has since the later 1970s been so divided by
class, race, sexuality and politics as to be no more than an ideological
expression. The same is true a fortiori of the ‘lesbian and gay
movement’.
What began in the 1960s-70s as a common movement against
racism has long splintered into a mass of much smaller ethnic and religious
constituencies asserting individualised forms of identity politics. One group
of elders, imams, etc are preferred interlocutors of the state; another layer
has entered into the business and professional classes; neither represents the
youth who periodically take to the streets.
When he states that “humanity’s predatory conduct towards
the rest of the biosphere” gives rise to “relations of oppression or
exploitation” independent of “the central economic conflict” Durand must mean
to refer to ‘green politics’ in its broadest sense. Yet it is even clearer than
in the case of the other ‘social movements’ that greens are forced to choose
between one or another form of economic organisation.
They are divided and unable to give a lead to society as a
whole because they are unable to choose collectively one way or the other. And
when a ‘distinctively green’ policy is produced, it offers precisely the
reactionary utopia of a return to petty family production - or in extreme cases
(‘deep greens’), the death of the vast majority of the present world human
population in order to return to an idealised version of hunter-gatherer
societies.
The definition of the proletariat by its separation from
the means of production (as opposed to peasants and artisans) means that the
proletariat as a class includes the whole class - employed and unemployed, men,
women and children - which is dependent on the wage fund. This, in turn, means
that, though trade unions are one of the most immediate forms of worker
organisation, it is only party organisation - organisation based in the
working class districts, and tackling all the aspects of the experience
of the class - which is really capable of expressing the unity of the class as
a class, its independent interests, its existence as a class ‘for itself’. It
is party organisation which can embed the particular trade union struggles in
the solidarity of the broader masses and legitimate them against the attempts
of the bosses to isolate them and present them as sectional claims.
In Britain in the recent past those Labour ward branches
which had significant roots withered away, the Eurocommunists destroyed the old
CPGB, and the Trotskyists were unable, due to their syndicalist-sectionalist
sectarianism, to rebuild an alternative. This left the rank and file trade
union militants isolated, exposed and demoralised in the face of the
Thatcherite offensive. This was demonstrated positively in the 1984-85 miners’
strike by the ability of the strike to generate very broad solidarity, since it
was based in mining communities rather than simply the pits, and was
fought in the interests of the unemployed and children as well as presently
employed workers. It was demonstrated negatively in the same struggle by the
fact that the Eurocommunists’ removal of the party key to the trade union and
Labour broad left, and their support for their Labour co-thinkers, the later
Blairite ‘soft left’, left the broad mass sentiment of solidarity without
channels to flow into generalised active resistance to the government. A
movement without a political party is not enough.
More immediately, as Callinicos quite correctly points out
in his response to the French texts, the social forums were in reality created
by a party - the Brazilian Workers Party - and the European Social Forum has
been primarily animated by Rifondazione Comunista and to a considerable extent
populated by party activists wearing one or another ‘social movement’ hat. A
movement ‘without political parties’ will rapidly prove to be illusory.
This, of course, leaves on one side the question: what sort
of party? In a sense, this was already debated between Marx and Engels and
their co-thinkers on the one hand, and the Lassalleans and Bakuninists on the
other. But systematic argument - and the disastrous errors of Stalinism
and Trotskyism on the question - belong to the strategies of the 20th century.
Durand argues that the possibilities of working class
political action have been reduced by the decline of the nation-state and
emergence of transnational governance structures, and the internationalisation
of production. Callinicos responds - correctly - that ‘globalisation’ is in
reality a turn in the policy of the dominant state, the US; and that
class struggles have been in a series of countries forced toward state
questions and the political stage.
It can be added: what’s new here? After all, I have quoted
Marx, above, writing in 1875, as saying that “the ‘framework of the present-day
national state’ - for instance, the German empire - is itself, in its turn,
economically ‘within the framework’ of the world market, politically ‘within
the framework’ of the system of states”.
A second generation of ‘globalisation theorists’ indeed have
moved beyond the idea that globalisation is something radically new, to the
idea that it is a return in some sense to the economic-political
characteristics of the late 19th century. They may like this or dislike it, but
the fact remains that the nationalisation of production and exchange
within competing trade blocs in the mid-20th century and the ‘managed trade’ of
the cold war period were innovations in relation to the period when Marx and
Engels wrote.
Something has indeed changed. What has changed is that the
foundations of a series of illusions about working class strategy are
gradually being destroyed. The system of rival imperial trade blocs promoted
the illusion that a really autarkic national economic and political regime was
possible. The grand example of this illusion was the Soviet Union. After World
War II, US imperialism’s policy of the ‘containment’ of ‘communism’ led it,
first, not to attempt immediately the reconquest of the USSR but to cooperate
in the bureaucracy’s self-blockade and, second, to make economic and political
concessions both to its former rivals in Europe and Japan, and to nationalists
in the semi-colonial/former colonial countries. The effect of all three was
indirect concessions to the working classes. This, too, in the period 1948-79
promoted the idea that the working class (or the oppressed peoples) could
achieve permanent gains through the nation-state and within the existing
nation-state system.
After the disasters, from their point of view, of the late
1960s and early 1970s, the US turned to a policy of rolling back both ‘communism’
and the concessions made to other states and to the working class. Among the
critical instruments of this shift have been the ideology and promotion of
‘human rights’, free-marketeering and conservative NGOs as instruments for
regime change, and the more aggressive deployment of international institutions
(IMF, WTO, etc, etc). The result is to reduce nation-states’ room for manoeuvre
and their willingness to make concessions to the local working class.
The strategic implication is that against the internationally
coordinated action of the capitalists, the working class needs to develop its
own internationally coordinated action. Marx and Engels both criticised the
Lassalleans - and hence the Gotha programme - for putting their faith in the
nation-state and (a corollary) putting off the internationally coordinated
action of the working class - international strikes, etc - to an indefinite
future of the ‘brotherhood of peoples’. The evidence both of the ‘short 20th
century’ and of the beginning of the 21st is utterly overwhelming in favour of
the correctness of this criticism and the strategic stance it expresses.
In 1875 the German socialists made a choice with which Marx
and Engels disagreed: to unify their forces on the basis of a programme which
had a ‘diplomatic’ character and obscured their differences. The fusion
happened at just the right time: the process of German unification under
Prussian leadership was accelerating, and the German economy had arrived at
industrial take-off. In consequence the unified Social Democratic Party of
Germany (SDP) was immensely successful, growing in the later 19th and early
20th century to a vast and deeply rooted system of mass organisations.
The result was that the principle of unity at all costs
became generalised and incorporated into the strategy of the socialist
movement. Unifications and attempts to unify divided forces were promoted in
France, Italy and elsewhere. Supporters could point to the awful example of
disunited and hence ineffective socialist movements in Britain, the USA and -
perhaps surprising to modern far-left eyes - Russia.
Were the leaders of the Second International right to
incorporate the principle of unity at all costs into their strategy? The answer
is complex and will require consideration of the great split during and
immediately after 1914-18, the Comintern’s party concept, and the ‘united
front’ and ‘popular front’ policies. But some assessment can be made of the
elementary idea.
The positive effects of broad unity - in substance a
‘snowball effect’ - were demonstrated in the rise of the SDP and more broadly
Second International. They have been reconfirmed positively by the growth of
the communist parties in their ‘popular front’ periods, and more recently by
the successes of such unitary attempts as the Brazilian Workers Party,
Rifondazione’s opening to the Italian far left groups and Scottish Militant
Labour’s creation of the Scottish Socialist Party.
They have been reconfirmed negatively by the incapacity of
the splintered Trot left to get beyond small squabbling groups: the SWP, in
spite of its feigned lofty indifference to the groups smaller than itself, is
perceived by the broad masses as being in the same league as them, and the same
is true of the larger groups in every country. Even the LCR and Lutte Ouvrière,
with approx 5% of the votes each in the 2002 presidential election, are held
back from a real breakthrough by their disunity.
On the other hand, in a certain sense the European working
class in 1914-18 paid the price of ‘unity at all costs’. It did so not at the
outbreak of war, when the leaders were carried along by the nationalisms of the
mass of the class, but when the character of the war became clear, as the
statist-nationalist right wing held the whip hand over an anti-war left which
was afraid to split the movement. Rather similarly, Chinese workers in 1927,
Spanish workers in 1937-39, French workers in 1940, Indonesian workers in 1965
and Chilean workers in 1973 paid a savage price for the communist parties’
policy of ‘unity at all costs’.
More immediately, it is far from clear that the Gotha policy
actually succeeded in setting the difference between Eisenachers and
Lassalleans on one side. By the 1890s, the SDP had escaped from illegality and
reached a size at which attitudes to the state and government participation (at
least in the provinces) became a live issue. The question of the state,
government, coalitions and socialist strategy then resurfaced for debate in the
SDP and (in varying forms) across the Second International. The questions were
not posed in identical forms to the differences between Eisenachers and
Lassalleans, but their underlying principle was common.
Around the turn of the 19th and 20th century we can identify
roughly three ‘strategic hypotheses’ in the socialist movement. The right wing
is traditionally identified with reference to Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary
socialism, though it in fact included various forms of ‘pure trade
unionist’ politics, ethical socialism and so on. The centre can be identified
roughly with reference to Karl Kautsky’s (relatively late) The road to power.
The left can similarly be identified, even more roughly, and equally on the
basis of a late text, with Rosa Luxemburg’s The mass strike, the
political party and the trade unions. “Even more roughly” because
Luxemburg’s position is in some respects intermediate between the Kautskyites
and the core of the left.
This history is directly material to the LCR comrades’
texts, and yet they are silent on it. Durand’s argument is for all practical
purpose a recapitulation under different forms of Bernstein’s Evolutionary
socialism. Artous and Durand alike identify the ‘strategy of the insurrectionary
general strike’ as growing out of 1970s Trotskyist reappropriation of 1920s
Comintern documents. Its actual roots in the ‘mass strike strategy’ debated in
the Second International have gone missing. With them has also gone missing
both the devastating critique of this ‘strategy’ mounted by the centre and
right, and the extent to which Luxemburg’s The mass strike involved a
modification of the voluntarism of the original strategy.
In a sense, too, we could make an analogy between
Callinicos’s position and Kautsky’s in the SDP’s and Second International’s
debates. Like Kautsky, Callinicos is verbally ‘orthodox’ and insists on
‘revolution’. Like Kautsky’s, Callinicos’s ‘revolutionism’ is deferred to an
indefinite future date. Like the SDP’s, the actual political practice of the
Socialist Workers Party protests the objectionable actions of the British state
- but does not offer a direct political challenge to its form as a state.
Both the content of the debate in the Second International
and its limitations are, then, essential if we are to understand modern
strategic questions rather than merely repeating old errors.
First published in Weekly Worker – February 2006