My first article discussed the partial debate on questions
of revolutionary strategy in the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and
Alex Callinicos’s comments on this debate (Weekly Worker February 16). I argued
that the LCR comrades were addressing genuine strategic issues, which
Callinicos largely evaded; but that to tackle these issues we needed to go back
to the history of the problem of ‘revolutionary strategy’.
In the second article I discussed the idea that Marxism
itself is a strategy - for the emancipation of the working class, through
collective action for communism; and for the emancipation of “all human beings
without distinction of sex or race” - ie, for communism - through the
emancipation of the working class (Weekly Worker February 23). I drew
out some corollaries of this strategic concept: on the one hand, rejection of dependence
on the existing state, and, on the other, the need for the working class to
organise and act internationally before the arrival of ‘the revolution’
or the socialist millennium.
I also discussed the choice made by the socialists of,
first, the German SPD and, later, the Second International to prioritise the
unity of the movement above all else. I concluded that the diplomatic
formulation of the Gotha programme and the general principle of unity at all
costs had not succeeded in suppressing strategic debate, and the core of the
‘problem of strategy’ began to be addressed in the debates between the right
wing of the movement, the Kautskyan centre, and the leftist advocates of a
‘strategy of the general strike’.
These tendencies drew on debates which had already
begun. The ‘general strike strategy’ was a variant form of positions which had
already been argued by the Bakuninists in the 1870s and were still maintained
by anarcho-syndicalists (who were formally excluded from the International -
except insofar as they appeared as representatives of trade union organisations
- in 1896). The policy of the right had indirect roots in the Lassalleans’
policy of demanding that the German imperial state support the workers against
the capitalists; its more immediate root was the (successful) coalition policy
of SPD regional leaders in southern Germany, which Engels criticised in The
peasant question in France and Germany (1894).
The Kautskyan ‘centre’ position took its starting point from
Marx’s and Engels’s polemics both against the anarchists at the time of the
split in the First International, and against the coalitionism of the
precursors of the right. But, though Kautsky (with a bit of arm-twisting from
Engels) had published Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme, he had by
no means internalised Marx’s and Engels’s criticisms of that programme. The
Erfurt programme was subject to some similar criticisms from Engels and, in the
German and international centre tendency, Kautsky was allied both with the true
author of the Gotha programme, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and with open Lassalleans
like Mehring.
The underlying common idea of the right wing of the movement
was that the practical task of the movement was to fight for reforms in the
interests of the working class. In order to win these reforms, it was necessary
to make coalitions with other tendencies which were willing to ally with the
workers’ movement. And in order to make coalitions, it was necessary in the first
place to be willing to take governmental office: it was by creating a coalition
government that the possibility really arose of legislating in the
interests of the working class, as well as of administrative measures (creating
social security systems, etc).
Secondly, it was necessary to be willing to make substantial
political compromises. Thus Engels, in The peasant question, polemicised
against Vollmar’s programmatic concessions to the peasantry in relation to
positive subsidies for family farming and in relation to trade union issues
affecting agricultural labourers employed by small farmers.
The largest compromise - but, from the point of view of the
right, the smallest - would be for the workers’ party to abandon its illusory
and futile revolutionism; and, with it, equally illusory Marxist claims about
crisis, and the notion that in an economic downswing reforms, as concessions
made to the working class, would tend to be taken back unless the working class
took political power into its own hands.
In the view of the right, the revolutionism was, after all,
already empty of content. The German party, for example, did not call openly
for the replacement of the monarchy by a republic and, though the Erfurt
programme contained a good set of standard democratic-republican demands (for
example, universal military training, popular militia, election of officials,
including judges, and so on), these were not central to the party’s agitational
work (see www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1891erfurt.html).
The claim that economic downswing would produce attacks on
concessions already made could perfectly well be conceded by rightists as true of
the bourgeoisie; but the argument that this was also true of the state depended
on the claim that the state was a class instrument in the hands of the
bourgeoisie, and was thus intertwined with revolutionism.
The right did not simply argue that getting rid of
revolutionism would make the workers’ party into a respectable party with which
other parties could do business, and which could therefore achieve coalitions,
and hence concessions. It also offered a variety of theoretical objections to
Marx’s and Engels’s arguments, based on christianity, Kantianism, nationalism
and early appropriations of the marginalist economists’ critiques of Marx. A
relatively sophisticated version was Bernstein’s Evolutionary socialism,
which argued that the scientific approach of Marx and Engels was diverted by
their residual Hegelianism into a utopian revolutionism.
The actual content of the various theoretical objections to
Marxism need not be considered here. The core question is the relative value of
Marxist and ‘constitutionalist’ arguments in terms of predictive power and,
hence, as a guide to action. To address this question it is necessary to
separate the rightists’ positive claim - that coalitions based on programmatic
concessions can win real reforms - from their negative claim, that
‘revolutionism’ is unrealistic, worthless and illusory.
It should be said right away that the positive claim is
true, to the extent that we are willing to treat partial gains for particular
groups of workers (eg, workers in Britain; or workers in industry; or in
particular industries) as gains for the working class as a whole.
This does not, in fact, depend on the fact that the workers’
party is a minority party and hence needs formal coalitions. If the workers’
party presents itself purely as a party of reform, it will also win members and
voters from the existing parties of reform. It may then, like the British
Labour Party after 1945, become a party which is in form a workers’ party
capable of forming a government on its own, but is in reality in itself a
coalition between advocates of the independent political representation of the
working class on the one hand, and liberal and statist reformers and political
careerists on the other: to use Lenin’s very slippery expression, a “bourgeois
workers’ party”.
The positive claim is, however, illusory. Part of this
illusory character is due to the fact that the negative claim is false. But
part of it is internal. The policy of coalitions based on programmatic concessions
is, as I said earlier, based on the need to form a coalition government
in order to get effective reforms. But this supposes from the outset that
reforms will take the form of state action to ameliorate the situation of the
workers. The reform policy is therefore a policy for the growth and increasing
power of the state and increased state taxation: as the Conservative press puts
it, for the “nanny state”.
The internal problem is that working class people are no
more fond of being in perpetual parental leading-reins from the state than the
middle classes: the aim of the emancipation of the working class is an
aspiration to collective and individual freedom. The policy of reform through
coalition governments therefore contains within itself - quite apart from the
falsity of the negative claim - the seeds of its own overthrow. The petty
tyrannies of the council house manager, the social services officials, the
benefit officials, etc become the ground of a conservative/liberal reaction
against the “nanny state” among important sections of the working class.
This is not merely a British phenomenon (the Thatcher
victory in 1979). It was seen in the largest possible scale in the fall of the
Stalinist regimes in 1989-91. And it has characterised the French, German and
Italian electoral cycles and those of Australia, Canada and the US at least
since the 1970s (in the last case, the Democrats play the role of the
reformists).
The predictive failure of the reformists’ negative claim
results, most fundamentally, in the national limit of its horizons. Capitalism
forms itself, from its beginnings, as a global socioeconomic formation. It is
an international greasy-pole hierarchy of competing firms. Within this
formation the nation-state is unavoidably a firm, and there is also a
greasy-pole hierarchy of competing states. The understanding that the
nation-state is a firm competing in the world market is a trivial commonplace
of modern capitalist politics: the need to preserve or improve ‘British competitiveness’
is a constant mantra of both Labour and Tories, and equivalents can be found in
the major parties of every country. It also forms part of Marx’s criticism of
the Gotha programme (quoted in my February 23 article). To form a government
within this framework therefore necessarily commits the participants to manage
the interests of the nation-state in global competition.
Success in this competition allows the basis for reforms in
the interests of the national working class. Or, more exactly, of sections
of the national working class: there are always groups (particularly
workers in small firms, young workers, migrants, etc) who must be excluded for
the sake of compromise with the middle class parties, as Engels predicted in
criticising Vollmar. But this success is not ‘purely economic’. Capitals are
able to externalise the costs of economic downswing onto weaker states
and the firms (and landlords, petty producers, etc) associated with these
states. Competition on the world market is thus military-political-economic.
The policy of reform through coalition governments thus
entails (a) the displacement of the business cycle onto the weaker states and
their firms and populations; and (b) the displacement of the social
polarisation which capitalism produces onto polarisation between nations.
On the one hand, this gives the reformists’ negative claims their credibility:
reforms are actually achieved and social polarisation is reduced in the
successful states. On the other, the reformists necessarily commit themselves
to sustaining and managing an imperial military force.
Sentimental objections to imperialism and foreign
adventures, and the residual commitment to the ideas of universal military
service and a people’s militia, inevitably give way, once reformists are
actually in government, to the hard needs of sustaining the state’s success and
standing in the global hierarchy, which is the only means by which reforms can
be sustained.
One result is that reformism of this kind tends to be
marginal in the ‘global south’: the power of the local state is simply
insufficient to displace the economic contradictions onto other states and
thereby offer long-term successful reforms.
Even this success at the price of bloody hands cannot
forever be sustained, because externalising the business cycle has its own
limits. As a world top-dog state, like Britain or the US, and the lead sectors
associated with this state, enter into decline, the externalised downswing
phase of the business cycle returns, affecting not only them, but the other
states near the top of the global hierarchy. Competition between these states
intensifies. As a result, if the state as a firm is to remain globally
competitive, it must endeavour to take back the reforms which have been given
and drive wages, hours and working conditions down towards the global average
(their true market value). The project of reform through coalition government
thereby comes to offer ‘reformism without reforms’ or merely the ‘less bad’
(Blair in preference to Major, and so on).
But every other state is also doing the same thing and, the
more they do it, the more global effective purchasing power declines, forcing
more attacks ... in reality, this is merely the downswing of the business cycle
postponed. It is accumulated in time and displaced onto a global scale,
returning as global market pressure on the nation-state. The downswing of the
ordinary business cycle must end in bankruptcies, which both free productive
capital from the claims of overproduced fictional capital to income, and
devalorise overinvested physical capital. It is the bankruptcies which free up
space for a new economic upswing.
In the same way, the global downswing must end in the
destruction of the global money and property claims of the declining world
hegemon state: Britain in 1914-45; the US at some point in this coming century.
In its (ultimately futile) efforts to put off this result, the declining world
hegemon state must respond by an increased exploitation of its financial claims
and its military dominance - as Britain did in the later 19th century, and as
the US is doing now. The deferred and transposed business cycle can only
overcome this problem by ending in war.
At the point of global war between the great powers, the
illusory character of the policy of reform through coalition government becomes
transparent. All that maintains the reformists are mass fear of the
consequences of military defeat, and direct support from the state in the form
of repression of their left opponents. Thus both 1914-18 and 1939-45 produced
major weakening of the reform policy within the workers’ movement and the
growth of alternatives. In the event, after 1945 the destruction of British
world hegemony enabled a new long phase of growth, and reformism was able to revive.
We are now on the road to another collapse of reformist politics ... but what
is lacking is a strategically plausible alternative.
The alternative offered by the left wing of the Second
International was the ‘strategy of the mass strike’. The idea was an elementary
one. In the first place, the strike weapon had been and remained at the core of
the effectiveness of trade union struggles for immediate demands. Secondly, the
struggle for the International itself was intimately connected with the
struggle for May Day - waged through international one-day strike action - from
its founding Congress in 1889.
The proposal of the left was that the International could
take the political initiative by extending the use of the strike weapon
in support of the demands of the minimum programme. As the working class was
increasingly able to win victories by this weapon, its confidence and political
self-assertiveness would grow, culminating (perhaps) in a general strike which
challenged for power - either demanding the transfer of political power to the
working class or (in the most Bakuninist form) immediately beginning the
creation of the new society out of the free cooperation begun in the strike
movement.
A range of theoretical grounds have been offered for this
strategic line, from theoretical anarchist reasonings, through varieties of
Hegelian Marxism, to interpretations of Trotsky’s Transitional programme.
As with the right, the theoretical arguments need not be considered here. Like
that of the right, the strategic line of the left involved both a positive
predictive claim and a negative one. The negative claim was that the method of
electoral struggle and coalitions - or even the effort to build permanent mass
workers’ organisations, as opposed to ad hoc organisations of mass struggle
like strike committees - necessarily led to corruption of the workers’
representatives and organisations and the evolution of these organisations into
mere forms of capitalist control of the working class. The positive claim was
that the method of the strike struggle could be extended and generalised.
Experience has something to tell us about the value of these claims.
The negative claim may, on its face, appear to be amply
proved by the experience of the 20th century. It is certainly true of the
policy of reform through coalition governments, for the reasons given above. On
the experience of the 20th century, it appears to be also true of the
‘Leninist party’, which claimed to escape it. Those communist parties which
took power became corrupt apparatuses tyrannising over the working classes of
their countries, and most have ended in a return to capitalism, while most of
the ‘official’ CPs of the capitalist countries have become simple reformist parties
of the kind advocated by the right wing of the Second International. The groups
to their left have, to the extent that they have attained mass support, gone
down the same path and, to the extent that they have not, have in the main
become fossilised sects; in either case, characterised internally by the petty
dictatorship of the party bureaucracy.
The trouble is that if the negative claim is taken seriously
to be absolutely proved, it is self-defeating. The implication is that nothing
can be done until the masses move into a mass strike wave, because to organise
in any other situation would imply the struggle for reforms, including
electoral activity’ coalitions, and organisational forms which turn out to be
corrupt. Unfortunately, however - as we will see in a moment - when a mass
strike wave does break out, this in itself immediately poses the questions of
government and forms of authority. Under these conditions, the unorganised
advocates of the mass strike as an alternative to permanent organisation and
the struggle for reforms are marginalised by the organised parties. Like the
Russian anarchists in the summer and autumn of 1917, the anarchist CNT trade
union confederation in the Spanish revolution, the Bolivian Trotskyists in 1951
and the Portuguese far left in 1974-76, they will be driven to give support to some
contender for governmental power, and lose any political initiative.
What I have just said is, in fact, no novelty. It is the
substance of Marx’s and Engels’s objection to the Bakuninists’ general strike
strategy, expressed (among other places) in Engels’s The Bakuninists at work
(1873). The Bakuninists ‘rejected authority’ - offering, in relation to the
First International, an early form of the idea that organising and fighting for
reforms leads to corruption, and advocating a form of general strike strategy.
When the revolutionary movement in Spain allowed them to seize power in some
localities in 1873, the result of their ‘rejection of authority’ was alliance
with localist forces, leading to an inability to take any coordinated action to
resist the counteroffensive of the military-clerical right wing against the
republicans.
The underlying problem is that ‘authority’ is, at bottom,
merely a means of collective decision-making. To ‘reject authority’ is
therefore to reject collective decision-making and - in the end - render
yourself powerless. The existing social structures of authority then reassert
themselves. In the end, anarchists have themselves discovered this, in Jo
Freeman’s famous pamphlet The tyranny of structurelessness (1970). It
happens just as much within small anarchist organisations (the ‘existing social
structures of authority’ then being gender and class hierarchy) as in mass
workers’ parties.
The almost uniform failure, by processes of
bureaucratisation and corruption, of workers’ and socialist parties, big and
small, tells us that we have not solved the problem of what sort of
authority - that is, what sort of mechanisms of decision-making - will serve
the interests of the working class. It also tells us that it is absolutely
urgent to do so; and that the standard Trotskyist response, originated by
Trotsky himself, that “the party ‘regime’ is not a political question”, is
profoundly false. The ‘party regime’ is inevitably the image of the sort of
regime we are fighting for.
But the proposition that the tyranny of structurelessness
leads to the reaffirmation of the existing social structures of authority is
true not only of groups and parties, but also of mass strike movements and
revolutionary crises - as the examples given above show. When we see why
this is the case, we will also see why the positive side of the ‘mass strike
strategy’ turns a partial truth into a strategic falsity.
Let us imagine for a moment a general strike which is both
truly general (everyone who works for a wage withdraws their labour) and
indefinite, to continue until certain demands are met, happening in a fully
capitalist country like Britain. Power supplies are cut off, and with them
water supplies and the telephone system. No trains or buses run, and no petrol
can be obtained except from small owner-run petrol stations; this soon runs
out. The supermarkets are closed, and no deliveries are made to those small
owner-run shops that remain open. The hospitals and doctors’ surgeries are
closed.
It should at once be apparent that this cannot continue for
more than a few days. If the result is not to be general catastrophe, the
workers need not simply to withdraw their labour, but to organise positively to
take over the capitalists’ facilities and run them in the interests of the
working class. A truly all-out indefinite general strike, therefore,
immediately demands the effective de facto expropriation of the capitalists.
As a result, it at once poses the question: will the state protect the
capitalists’ property rights? In other words, it poses the question of
political power.
Now, of course, what the advocates of the mass strike
strategy were calling for was not such a truly all-out indefinite general
strike called by the political party. The reality of mass strike movements is
something a great deal more messy, of the sort described, for Russia, in
Luxemburg’s The mass strike, but seen since then in many different
countries at different times (See also Jack Conrad’s discussion in Weekly Worker January 13 2005). The
political regime falls into crisis. Some spark sets off the mass movement.
Rather than a single, planned, truly all-out, indefinite general strike, there
is a wave of mass strikes - some protest actions for political demands; some
partial struggles for economic demands. They begin to overlap and are
accompanied by political radicalisation.
But a movement of this sort still poses the question
of political power, and for exactly the same reasons. A mass strike wave
disrupts normal supply chains. This can be true even of a strike in a single industry,
like the miners’ strikes in Britain in 1972 and 1974. Equally, however, the
capitalists’ property rights are, from their point of view, not merely rights
to things, but rights to the streams of surplus which can be made to flow from
these things. The strike in itself is therefore an interference with their
property, and a mass strike wave threatens the security of their property. They
begin to disinvest, and to press the state for stronger action against
strikers.
The economy begins to come unravelled. The loss of the
normal (capitalist) mechanisms of authority (decision-making) impacts on the
broad masses in the form of dislocation and shortages of goods. A strike wave
or revolutionary crisis can last longer than a truly all-out indefinite general
strike, but it cannot last longer than a period of months - at most a couple of
years. In this situation, if the workers’ movement does not offer an
alternative form of authority - alternative means of decision-making which are
capable of running the economy - the existing social structures of authority
are necessarily reaffirmed. Either the military moves in (Spain in 1873-74 and
1936, etc) or the reformists, put in power, re-establish capitalist order
(Ebert-Scheidemann in 1918; everywhere in Europe in the immediate aftermath of
World War II; in a much weaker sense, the 1974-79 Wilson government in
Britain).
The ‘mass strike strategy’ thus precisely fails to resolve
the strategic problem of authority which the negative aspect of the left’s
approach - the critique of the struggle for reforms - posed.
Lenin in 1917 believed that the Russian working class had
found in the soviets - workers’ councils - the solution to the strategic
problem of authority posed by the mass strike movement. Growing out of the
strike movement itself, the soviets created a form of authority which shared
the characteristics of democracy and accountability from below which Marx
described in the Paris Commune. Communism could therefore take the political
form of the struggle for soviets and for soviet power.
In fact, as I have argued before, this belief was illusory
(see Weekly Worker Nov 11 2004). Almost as
soon as the Bolsheviks had taken power, they were forced to move from a militia
to a regular army, and with it came logistics and the need for a state
bureaucracy. The soviets and militia could not perform the core social
function of the state, defending the society against external attack. 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 corrupt bureaucratic regime.
But ‘All power to the soviets’ was also illusory in another
sense. Even before they withered away into mere fronts for the Russian
Communist Party, the soviets did not function like parliaments or governments -
or even the Paris Commune - in continuous session. They met discontinuously,
with executive committees managing their affairs. Though the Bolsheviks took
power in the name of the soviets, in reality the central all-Russia coordination
of the soviets was provided by the political parties - Mensheviks and SRs, and
later Bolsheviks. It was Sovnarkom, the government formed by the
Bolsheviks and initially including some of their allies, and its ability to
reach out through the Bolshevik Party as a national organisation, which
‘solved’ the crisis of authority affecting Russia in 1917.
Subsequent history confirms this judgment. Workers’ councils
and similar forms have appeared in many strike waves and revolutionary crises
since 1917. In none have these forms been able to offer an alternative centre
of authority, an alternative decision-making mechanism for the whole society.
This role is unavoidably played by a government - either based on the surviving
military-bureaucratic state core, or on the existing organisations of the
workers’ movement.
In Cuba, for example, the overreaction of the Batista regime
to a small guerrilla organisation, the July 26 Movement, in November 1958
triggered a general strike which brought the regime down. The ensuing two years
saw a succession of government arrangements and a continuing wave of action by
the working class in various forms. The end result was a party-state regime
formed by the merger of a minority of the July 26 Movement with the much larger
Popular Socialist Party (Communist Party). It was the PSP which, in the end,
provided the alternative centre of authority.
The falsity of the line of ‘All power to the soviets’ brings
us momentarily back to the current debate in the French Ligue. At least some in
the Ligue have recognised the falsity of their variant of ‘All power to the
soviets’ - the ‘organs of dual power’ line of the Tenth Congress of the
Mandelite Fourth International (or, as Artous and Durand put it, the strategy
of the insurrectionary general strike). But then the question is, what strategy?
Durand’s strategy is a version of Eurocommunism, and this was itself a variant
of the positions argued by Bernstein and the right wing of the Second
International. We have seen in this article that this is no strategy either.
We should also have seen that the problem with both
strategies centres on the questions of government as a central coordinating
authority, and the role and structural forms of the military-bureaucratic
state. The right sought to form governments based on the existing state; the
left adopted a strategy which, at the end of the day, evaded the whole problem
of state authority. In truth, these issues, originally debated between the
1870s and 1900s, are live, unresolved questions in today’s politics. In the
next article we will see what, if anything, the centre tendency in the Second
International led by Karl Kautsky - which until 1914 included the Bolsheviks -
has to teach us on these issues.
First published in Weekly Worker – March 2006