Neprimerimye

2008-11-04T20:08:00.000-08:00

O'Barmy Wins Big!

Ok, so another right wing dirtbag has won. Big fucking deal.

A lot of good decent American workers and toilers will now have illusions in this charlatan. So this fraud will get a honeymoon period. Yeah great innit?

No it fucking aint. What is needed is for American workers not to rely on O'Barmy but to start to FIGHTBACK now.

Last time a fraud of this size got elected that is exactly what happened under Roosevelt back in the 193o's. I have every faith in the fighting traditions of our American sisters and brothers to wage the kind of struggle that is now so urgently needed.

FOR A SOVIET AMERICA! FOR WORKERS POWER! FOR THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT!

2008-11-04T17:31:00.000-08:00

Great Americans Pt 23/a

FREDERICK DOUGLAS

It is a great tragedy for the USA that Frederick Douglas never ran as a candidate for President. Had he done so, as candidate of the Radical Republicans, then an alliance might have been formed between the rising workers movement and the newly emancipated slave population of the South. The misery that has been American history since the final defeat of radical Reconstruction in 1877 could have meant great advances for the greatest nation on this planet. But alas we have seen those twin gravediggers of American capitalism, the strategically important Black population and the working classes hegemonised by the Dimmicrats and Republicrats.

2008-11-04T15:13:00.000-08:00

The US Elections

The horrors never cease. Dweedledum versus Tweedledumber. See Shiraz Socialist and Dolphinarium for all the gory details. Will the SPUSA or the SWP (Barnes) candidate become Prez? Who knows? Who cares? Not I!

Surely the USA needs a version of the Left List? Does the SWP (Britlandia) have any friends in the colonies that would venture such an historic advance? Nah, they have more sense and long since split from the fading mess that is the SWP.

What a shame though that Galloway cannot stand not being born in the USA. At least it would remove him from these shores.

2008-07-13T09:09:00.000-07:00

THE DUAL CHARACTER OF THE USSR
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MARXISM VERSUS PHRASEMONGERING

By Jock Haston

RCP Conference Documents, 1946, pps 16-33

August 4th, 1946.

The class nature of the USSR, its evolution and degeneration is certainly the most difficult social phenomena that Marxists have had to explain for many years. Only our movement, the Trotskyist movement, has made a serious attempt to give that scientific explanation.

It was Trotsky who sounded the alarm when the degeneration which had already commenced under Lenin – when Stalin first took the helm – began to take a serious turn. It was Trotsky who explained the problem theoretically and charted the actual degeneration as it took place. Ours is the contemporary Marxist movement, we were trained above all, on an understanding of the problem of the Russian Revolution and the degeneration of the Russian state.

Most of the novel theories regarding new forms of class oppression and state functions were evolved by ex-Trotskyists turning away from the revolutionary movement. Outside the Trotskyist movement there has been no serious attempt to destroy revisionist schools with scientific criticism. Only the Trotskyist movement has seriously taken pains to explain the political and philosophical theories of those revisionist schools. We should not, therefore be taken by surprise at novel interpretations of Russian society, its economics and evolution. Yet the movement still seems full of surprises.

The most recent “surprise” was dropped like a bombshell into the RCP in the form of the ideas expounded and defended by our Minority at the last Central Committee held on the 7th July, and since repeated at a London aggregate on July 13th. These debates revealed ideological divergences from the Trotskyist position on the art of the Minority (Comrades Goffe, Healy, Lawrence, Finch and their supporters) which we have never heard before in the Trotskyist movement; at least not in the British party. Ideas in relation to Russian society that we had heard expounded only by the most ignorant Stalinists, were put forward and hotly defended by our comrades.

The comrades of the Minority alleged that the Central Committee resolution on the Russian question was a deviation from the Trotskyist position. And what des this deviation consist of? It consists of the statement that Russia has both capitalistic and socialistic features and a description of some of these capitalistic features.

The comrades don’t mind Russia being called a “degenerated” or “deformed” worker’s state, or even a “profoundly deformed” worker’s state. There we still have agreement. They balk somewhat at the statement that there exist capitalistic as well as socialistic features. They most definitely refuse to allow the description “capitalistic” to go further than covering petty handicraft economy and their petty market exchange. To go further than this, our comrades allege, is to fall into a new deviation!

For us, all the various forms of petty bourgeois enterprise and accumulation, which find their expression within and between the collective forms on the basis of trading, etc, or which arise from petty trading and black marketing, all these are taken for granted as part of the duel process. In the final analysis, these, as all other capitalistic relations in Russian society, flow from the backwardness of technique. But these primitive capitalist forms of production and exchange play a negligible role in the economy as a whole.

Breaking through the pores of planned economy, these primitive but persistent capitalist forms pf production and distribution will only be eliminated with the higher level of technique and culture. For the purpose of our present discussion it is necessary only that their existence and characteristics be kept in mind. We are only concerned with other aspects of the problem in which the degeneration towards capitalist relations find expression in the social differentiation that has arisen on the basis of nationalised property.

To describe “goods” produced by the state as “commodities”; to describe labour employed by the Russian state and paid wages as “wage labour”; to describe the differentiation that arises from those social relations as ”capitalistic”. (or the state, insofar as it defends these relations, as a “capitalist” state) as in paragraph 2 of the CC resolution – all these definitions are sacrilege, comrades, our Minority tell us, and constitute a deviation from Trotskyism!

Ideas and conceptions which we have propounded together with these comrades for years, they suddenly toss overboard and replace, them with what turns out t be nothing but the crudest Stalinist conceptions. All this in the name of Trotskyism, of defending our orthodox position!

We are faced apparently, not with a simple mistake on the part of those comrades, from which they will surreptitiously withdraw – as they have withdrawn from so many positions in the past! (although even such a fresh withdrawal is not excluded). We are faced with a whole new school of thought (?) for the Trotskyist movement which will have t be refuted and destroyed no less completely than the Burnham, Shachtman and other false schools of thought on the Russian question.

THE NUB OF THE CONTROVERSY

We list below some of the ideas put forward and defended by the Minority. Let us hope that they will stop in their tracks and retreat and not (as they must if they pursue their ideas to the end) produce a new “Das Kapital” on economic laws in socialist society!

The Minority state:

1) That the state products in Russia are not commodities but “goods”; which term, when elaborated by the comrades themselves, means that they are produced for use and not for exchange.

2) That the law of value, insofar as this relates to the exchange of “goods” does not apply in Russia.

3) They deny that the circulation of money in Russia is a capitalistic relation, ie that money is a measure of value, means of exchange and medium of payment.

4) They deny that there is wage labour in Russia.

5) They deny that the state in Russia occupies the same relation to the national economy as the individual capitalist occupies in relation to the single enterprise, and that it expropriates surplus value from the workers.

6) They deny that any of these economic relations referred to in paragraph 2 of the C resolution are capitalistic relations; and declare that it is false to say that insofar as the state protects these capitalistic relations, it is a “capitalist state.”

7) They declare that to state that the Russian workers are wage slaves is t deny the existence of a workers’ state, since the ruling class cannot be slaves.

8) They deny that the bureaucracy exploits the Russian workers and peasants economically.

To crown these absurdities they declare that if one insists that these relations do in fact exist, and do in fact have the class character designated to them by the CC resolution, then it is impossible to talk of a degenerated workers’ state: what you have is “state capitalism”.

What then is the class content of the degeneration of the Soviet Union? The Minority refuse to tell us. Bureaucratic deformation is followed by more bureaucratic deformation, or profound bureaucratic deformation. But the class content of this deformation, of this we are not told.

It is not a question of the workers’ state being saddled with a hump on its back that is growing bigger. Such an organic analogy is useful only if properly understood. But when it leads comrades to ignore and deny the necessary conclusions of a class character, then it must be replaced by a more precise organic or social picture.

Trotskyists have always held that in Russian society there are two class forces at work: socialist and capitalist, These two social systems express themselves in the state as a dual power, each struggling for mastery, each trying to devour the other.

The socialist relation, which for us is the decisive relation, and upon which we base our class characterization of the Russian state, is state property, with the planned system of production and the monopoly of foreign trade, which resulted from the Russian revolution of 1917 and the expropriation of the ruling class.

All the other social relations – soviets, workers democracy, and proletarian accounting and control, proletarian equality, etc., - all have been destroyed by the Stalinist bureaucracy, which has substituted essentially capitalistic relations in place of these socialist relationships. The new constitution and the more recent “reforms” of that constitution prepare the political bases for the bourgeois counter-revolution.

Socialist relations are devoured and replaced by other kinds of relations in the process of degeneration. We call the capitalist relations. The Minority refuse t do so. And in this, whether they like it or not, they will find themselves in the company of Shachtman. Behind the terminological differences lies a theoretical appreciation of the class character of the Russian state and of its degeneration.

In this bulletin we can only touch on some of these issues. Nevertheless, what we may say will be sufficient to indicate the magnitude of the Minority’s revisionism.

THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE RESLUTION

In the resolution of the Central Committee, we begin with a statement of our traditional position on the contradictory nature of the Russian state:

“The CC reaffirms the basic programmatic conception of the Fourth International as they relate to the Soviet Union, to the dual nature of the system of society in the USSR as a transitional regime between capitalism and socialism and which therefore has both capitalist and socialist forces at conflict with each other.”

Having stated the class nature of the contradiction, we then proceed to describe important features (by no means all) of the Russian state which express the capitalistic germs, or that side of the contradiction. We do this in Paragraph 2 as follows:

“It declares that the payment of wage labour, the production of commodities, the circulation of money, and the differentiations which exist on the basis of these capitalistic social relations, gives a capitalist character to the state (which occupies the same position in relation to the actual economy as the capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise) in the first stages of even a healthy proletarian revolution,. In this sense, the capitalist state exists but without a capitalist class, insofar as the state in Russia is bureaucratic, degenerated and totalitarian, which encourages the degeneration towards capitalist differentiation, the capitalist characteristics of this state assume tremendous and growing proportions…”

But those features, capitalistic as they are, are not decisive for us in determining the basic class character of the Russian state. The concluding sentence of Paragraph 2 makes this absolutely clear:

“Nevertheless n the basis of these features it is erroneous to draw the conclusion that Russian economy is a state capitalist economy.”

The basic character of the Russian state is determined according to the method taught by Trotsky: according to the property forms and relations that resulted from the Russian Revolution and which still exist. This is laid down in paragraph 3 as follows:

“The fundamental class nature of the USSR as a workers’ state that degenerated in the direction of capitalism is established for us on the basis of the nationalisation of land, of the basic means of production, and monopoly of foreign trade in the hands of the state. These remain the fundamental gains of the October Revolution of 1917, and are the economic premise for our class characterization.”

Later we will elaborate on the other sections of the CC resolution, but in view of the opposition centred on the first three paragraphs, we here confine ourselves to an exposition of the ideas on which there exists a conflict.

IS IT A BRIDGE?

The comrades claim that paragraphs 2 and 3 bridge two positions: capitalist and socialist. We can only reply that we have been ding this since the Trotskyist movement arose in opposition to Stalinism. Yes, comrades there is a contradiction expressed in paragraphs 2 and 3 of our resolution. This is expressed in its general form in paragraph 1. But that contradiction was not coked up in our minds overnight: it exists in real life in Russian society and has existed since 1917. if our critics have given lip service to the existence of this contradiction in the past, without understanding it; if they have converted a profoundly dialectical conception of Russian society into a vulgar sophism and mere phrasemongering, that is not the fault of our teachers. Nor is it our fault. We have done our best to explain the problem.

In the “Revolution Betrayed” Trotsky deals with the contradiction in a passage which we will introduce at this stage in the discussion – although we will return to it again, because it states the problem exactly as we understand it and state it. It answers the opponents of the Trotskyist conception exactly as we would answer them:

“The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialisitic insofar as it defends social property in the means of production: bourgeois insofar as the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalitistic measure of value. Such a contradiction may horrify the dogmatists and scholastics: we can only offer them our condolences. (Our emphasis)

Trotsky may have written this (in 1936) for the benefit of the RCP Minority ten years later!

PRODUCTION FOR SALE – OR DISTRIBUTION!

The leading argument of our comrades is that all capitalist laws and categories are eliminated in Russia because of the plan. Comrade Finch, supported by the other Minority members of the CC, said that production of gods by the state in Russia was not commodity production, was not production for sale on the market, but on the contrary was production for use! He promised to write us a thesis on this within a few days, but we are still waiting.

Throughout the “Revolution Betrayed” Trotsky talks of the production and sale of commodities in Russia. Even Stalin understood this question, although only a little better than our Minority! Trotsky quotes Stalin (1935) in the “Revolution Betrayed” as follows:

“The stability of the Soviet Valuta, is guaranteed primarily by the immense quantity of commodities in the hands of the state put in circulation at stable prices.”

The only thing which is correct in this statement is that the state put an immense quantity of commodities into circulation. All that is mistaken in it (which is answered by Trotsky on Page 30 of the “Revolution Betrayed”) is taken over lock, stock and barrel by the Minority!

Nor des the argument, developed by Comrade Goffe, that only during the NEP did you have widespread commodity production, help their case in any degree. In 1936 Trotsky pointed out:

“The growth of commodity circulation under the restored market has been very rapid”!

On page 115 of “Revolution Betrayed” the Old Man wrote:

“In the year 1935 (note the dates well, comrades of the Minority, and note especially the economic definition) “the system of planned distribution gave way to trade…”

“The raising of the productivity of labour, in particular through piecework payment, promises in the future an increase in the mass of commodities…”

“A raising of the productivity of labour on the basis of commodity circulation means at the same time a growth of inequality…”

One could go on quoting from the Old Man for pages, but for the present enough. No wonder the promises of the comrades to rush into print have not been kept!

THE LAW OF VALUE AND THE PLAN

It is clear, or ought to be, from an earlier quotation from Trotsky, that the consequences ensuing from the distribution of life’s goods with a “capitalistic measure of value,” must be capitalistic consequences. Not only do our comrades of the Minority deny, however, that those consequences are capitalistic – they even deny that in Russia, distribution takes place according to the law of value and thus with a capitalistic measure of value! This repeated denial that the law of value applies in Russia insofar as this is an exchange of commodity equivalents, is an innovation in the Trotskyist movement.

Comrades Goldberg and Healy expressed their conception of the problem at the London aggregate as follows:

Comrade Goldberg: In capitalist societies the law of value applies. Value exchanges in equivalent quantities. But in Russia the law of value does not apply, goods exchange not in equal quantities, but in unequal quantities.

Comrade Healy, arguing in favour of this case, and to demonstrate that goods exchange at unequal values, said that the coal mines in the Urals have lost money for years, but the Soviet government has made up the deficit… from central funds.

It did not occur to Comrade Healy that it is precisely because of the low level of technique that the Russians cannot escape the law of value, that the coal mines received the subsidy. The function of the government subsidy is to enable coal to be sold below its value. Comrade Healy apparently forgot that the British government subsidises food to the tune of millions for the same purse, and according to the same law of value. (And please don’t tell us about the capitalists’ rake-off – for this is another question.)

Perhaps it is as well to restate the elements of the Marxian law of value at this stage of the discussion, for our opposition have shown an amazing ignorance of that law.

THE LAW OF VALUE AND SURPLUS VALUE

The law of value expresses the fact that gods or commodities exchange according to the amount of labour used up in their production, or embodied in them. This law (as was the existence of that part of the product we now call surplus value) was known in its general form before Karl Marx, to the classical capitalist economists. But not completely. It had for them, many unsolved aspects, facets and contradictions. Marx subjected the classical theory to criticism and established what kind of labour produces value. Not the special labour of the miller, the spinner or the steel worker, that special concrete kind of labour produces use-value. Human labour in the abstract: it is this kind of labour that gives to a useful article its exchange value. And this labour must be socially useful labour.

“The value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general” says Marx in “Capital”. “Unskilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled labour being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour.”

“Just as a commodity is something twofold, use-value and exchange value”, wrote Frederick Engels, “so the labour embodied in it is two-fold determined: on the one hand, as definite productive labour: on the other, as the simple expenditure of human labour power, precipitated abstract labour. The former produces use-value, the latter exchange values; only the latter is quantitatively comparable (the differences between skilled and unskilled, composite and simple labour confirm this)”. In this division economics was for the first time, given a scientific definition of the labour that creates value.

Classical bourgeois economy was helpless in face of the following contradiction: since it is claimed that only equal values are exchanged, how can the worker receive the full value of his product if it is admitted that this product is divided between worker and capitalist?

It was Karl Marx who solved this contradiction, and demonstrated that despite the fact that the capitalist buys commodities at their value and sells them at their value, he gets more value out of the transaction than he puts into it. Marx did this by showing that the capitalist buys one commodity which has a property peculiar to itself, in that, this commodity, in the process of its use, is a source of new value, is a creation of new value. This commodity is labour power. But the capitalist does not buy the labour of the worker, or his product, as had previously been held by classical bourgeois economists. The capitalist buys the power to labour, and for a definite time.

By substituting labour power for labour, Marx was able to reveal the process which led to the creation of surplus value by the worker, and its appropriation by the capitalist. Surplus value, over and above the amount of value which the capitalist gave the worker, or exchanged with him in the form of wages, for the use of his labour power.

The capitalist did not buy the labour, or the product of the worker, Marx explained. He bought the power to labour; and he bought this power to labour for a definite number of hours. After the worker had used his energy in productive labour for a definite portion of time (say a half) for which the employer had bought his labour power, he had created sufficient values to replace or exchange for the means of subsistence supplied to him by the capitalist in the shape of pay. Marx terms this portion of the labour, necessary labour. The other portion of labour (the other half), Marx terms surplus labour. All new values created in the labour process after the necessary labour has been used up and during the period of surplus labour Marx termed surplus value, from which profit and capitalist accumulation arose.

This theory, the theory of surplus value, was the really great contribution of Karl Marx to political economy which, for the first time raised economics from its blind grasping and shed a scientific light n the economic process.

This aspect of Marxian economics (the theory of surplus value) need not concern us for the moment, in further discussing the law of value. Although the denial of our Minority that surplus value is extracted from the workers in Russia will be dealt with later. Nor will we concern ourselves here with the differentiation of surplus value into relative and absolute surplus value because it has n importance for our present discussion.

In practice, the tendency of commodities is to exchange above or below their value. It is not in the given commodity transaction that the law finds exact confirmation and expression, but on the average exchange transaction in economy as a whole. Commodity exchange, we know, dates back more than 6,000 years in Babylonia. To the extent that economic laws are at al valid, that is to say from the beginning of exchange down to the present time, the Marxian law of value holds good.

In the first stages of communist society, it will not be possible to immediately abolish all capitalist rights, laws and methods. It will not be possible to abolish all capitalist relationships in production and distribution, and substitute socialist relationships immediately in their stead. This law of value, which has operated down through the ages wherever and whenever men exchange their labour in one form or another, will still continue to operate in the first stages of socialist or communist society. The founder of scientific socialism was the first to explain that in the first stages of socialism the exchange of labour would still take place according t the law f value.

THE LAW OF VALUE AND THE FIRST STAGES OF SOCIALIST SOCIETY

The seizure of power by the working class and the stratification of the means of production will abolish the capitalist appropriation of the surplus. At this point, production really begins for the first time, to become social production; controlled socially and democratically by the working class. But capitalistic production still exists in the distribution of the social product. Capitalist right, capitalist principle – the law of value – will still exist in the first stage of socialist society. Karl Marx wrote in the “Critique of the Gotha Programmne”:

“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly the individual producer receives back from society - after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives back to it what he has given to it is his individual amount of labour, for example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual labour hours; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social labour day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common fund), and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of labour. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here obviously, the same principle as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass into the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption. But, as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity-equivalents, so much labour in one form is exchanged for s much labour in another form.

Hence equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer in conflict, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange only exists on the average and not in the individual case.

In spite of this advance, this equal right is still stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour.
(Emphasis in the original)

Take note what we repeat, comrades of the Minority: “The same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal value… so much labour is in one form is exchanged fr an equal amount of labour in another form.” Is this not the law of value, operating in the first stages of socialism, no less than it operates under capitalism? Yes! The situation has been transformed: “Content and form are exchanged”, “Principle and practice no longer in conflict.” Why are they no longer in conflict? Because no one can give anything except his labour. The capitalist as such (having been expropriated), no longer has the opportunity to exploit the worker, he has no capital through which he can dominate production. He also can, and must, give his labour if he wants to live. The class inequality in relation to means of production between worker and capitalist has been abolished. Equal rights prevail. But this equal right is still “stigmatised by a bourgeois limitation.”

“The right of the purchasers is proportional to the labour they supply: the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour.”

Thus, the law of value applies to everyone in practice for the first time! Only in the higher stages of communist society will it be possible to abolish the bourgeois limitation of the exchange of labour according to the law of value and for society t inscribe on its banners the socialist law: “From each according to his ability, t each according to his needs.”

Even the theoretical equality visualised by Marx, does not in fact exist in the Soviet Union. The whole tendency, on the contrary, is for the “old crap” to revive, including the practical violation of equal right. This is dealt with in the concluding section of this article. But let it be noted here that the law of value operates in Russia, they have just as consistently failed to explain what laws do operate – if any - to regulate the exchange of “goods”. Perhaps the comrades will tell us in writing: what laws operate in the exchange of “goods” between one government trust and another, between the trusts and the consumers, the state as employer and the worker as producer? We would be very pleased to be informed of the economic laws of this process.

THE MEASURE OF VALUE

Mney, Engels explained, is already contained in embryo in the concept of money, only in developed form. Only when products are no longer exchanged as value, said Trotsky, will money cease to have a function as measure of value, and wither away, together with the state.

Once the exchange of commodities becomes more diversified and evolved above the stage of simple barter, it becomes necessary to measure the value of commodities by a common standard. Money arose to fulfill that function of a common standard: money became the “universal equivalent.” All commodities expressed their relation to each other through money, as price. We are not concerned here with dealing with all the diversified functions of money in its various forms of capital or the laws of that movement. We are concerned only with money as a measure of value, means of payment and exchange.

In the “Revolution Betrayed” Trotsky makes the following statement:

“The dynamic Soviet economy, passing as it does through continual technical revolutions, and large-scale experiments, needs more than any other continual testing by means of a stable measure of value.”

In Russia, as in capitalist Britain, labour is not yet measured by a direct and absolute measure, time, but by the old, indirect, relative fluctuating capitalistic measure: money. Thus arise wages and prices – or more precisely, wages and prices continue with all their capitalistic implications. When the exchange of labour in one form for an equal quantity of labour in another form disappears, and is replaced by socialist distribution, only then, comrades of the Minority, will the law of value not apply in Russia, or anywhere else.

Let us ask our comrades once again: what law determines the ratio in which shoes exchange for socks, or motor cars or any other commodity or product exchanges for money? Let the comrades explain the economics of this process. If it is not the law of value that determines the ratio, let them explain what function money has in these transactions except as a measure of value.

Is the ratio of exchange to be explained according to the subjective desires of the bureaucracy? Stalin, we know, at one time believed that it was; that value and its money measure could be exchanged and altered according to the will of the bureaucracy – and introduced the differential price, the elastic rouble! But the reality that underlies all exchanges and expresses itself as the law of value son began to knock at the door, and corrected this stupid mistake, Stalin learned that “gods” could not be exchanged in an arbitrary manner, at unequal values. Stalin learned that if the economy of the country has to be stabilized while money continues to play a role, it can only be stabilized if money really functions as a stable measure of value.

WAGE LABOUR IN RUSSIA

Our Minority comrades deny that the wage labour relation in Russia is a capitalistic relation, that it is part of the dual capitalistic-socialist nature of the Russian society. Indeed, they strongly deny that wage labour exists in Russia. They claim that if the Russian workers are wage slaves, they cannot at the same time be the ruling class; therefore Russia cannot be a workers’ state. The restatement of this elementary proposition by us today, expounded and defended in our publications for more than 15 years, has now according to them, become the platform of a new petty bourgeois tendency. They deny that the Russian worker sells his labour power as a commodity.

Then only economists who have put forward these conceptions are Stalinist economists. And they did so because they believed them, but with the object of deceiving the working class. They appear to have succeeded in this even in the ranks of the Trotskyist movement!

The payment of wages, because it takes place in Russia, does not transform the worker receiving wages, into something other than a wage labourer, even though the transaction takes place on the basis of statified property. As we have seen above, the law of value continues to operate even in the first stages of a socialist society. The payment of wages is the price or money equivalent of the labour power of the workers. It still remains the price of labour power in Russia today – even though no capitalist class dominates the means of production.

In view of the tremendous amount of theoretical and agitational material written by the Bolsheviks on this question, with which our comrades have undoubtedly at east a working acquaintance, how can they bring themselves down in the mess they are in? Lenin speaking on the immediate tasks of the Soviet Government, explaining how, why and by what methods, the Soviet Government had to utilise the technical skill of the capitalist specialists, had this to say;

“The vast majority of the saboteurs are ‘coming into our service’ but the best organizers can be utilized by the state either in the old way, in the bourgeois way (i.e. for high salaries), or in the new way, in the proletarian way (i.e. by creating the conditions of national accounting and control from below, which would inevitably and automatically subordinate the specialists and enlist them for our work).

Now we have to resort to the old bourgeois method and agree to pay a very high price for the services of the biggest bourgeois specialists. All who are familiar with this subject appreciate this, but not all ponder over the significance of the measure that has been adopted by the proletarian state. Clearly such a measure is a compromise, a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and of every proletarian state, which calls for the reduction of all salaries to the level of the wages of the average worker, which call for a struggle against careerism, not in words, not in deeds.

Moreover, it is clear that such a measure not only implies the cessation – in a certain field and to a certain degree – of the offensive against capital (for capital is not a sum of money, but a definite social relation) it is also a step backward on the part of the socialist Soviet government which from the outset proclaimed and pursued the policy of reducing high salaries to the level of the wages of the average worker…

To conceal from the masses the fact that the enlistment of bourgeois specialists by means of extremely high salaries is a retreat from the principles of the Paris commune would be tantamount to sinking to the level of bourgeois politicians and to deceiving the masses…”
(Our emphasis)
Vol 7, Selected Works, page 322-323.

“It is clear” we want to repeat this passage because of its importance in the present dispute “that such a measure (paying high wages – JH) not only implies a cessation – in a certain field and to a certain degree – of the offensive against capital (“for capital is not a sum of money but a definite social relation) IT IS ALSO A STEP BACKWARD… (Backward to what comrades of the Minority? To formless degeneration or to bureaucratic collectivism? Or a step backwards to capitalism? – JH) on the part of our socialist government which from the outset proclaimed and pursued a policy of reducing high salaries to the level of wages of the average worker.”

Writing in the “Revolution Betrayed” Trotsky quoted from “Pravda”:

“The worker in our country is not a wage slave and is not a seller of a commodity called labour power. He is a free workman” (PRAVDA)

And Trotsky comments:

“For the present period this unctuous formula is unpermissable bragging. The transfer of the factories t the state changed the situation of the worker only juridically. In reality, he is compelled t live in want and work a definite number of hours for a definite wage..”

“…In order to raise this level, the state now resorted to the old methods of pressure upon the muscles and nerves of the worker. There grew up a corps of slave drivers. The management of industry became superbureaucratic. The workers lost all influence whatever upon the management of the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible police repression penetrating the life of every factory, it is hard indeed for the worker to feel himself a ‘free workman.’ In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state, the employer. Free labour is incompatible with the existence of a bureaucratic state.”

The task of slave drivers is to drive slaves. Juridically these slaves are also the controllers of the state and thereby the nationalised means of production. In reality they have access only through the bureaucratic state. In reality, the fact that the workers are compelled to sell their labour power for wages in order to live, converts them into wage slaves.

“…Wage labour does not cease even under the Soviet regime to wear the humiliating label of slavery. Payment ‘according to work’ – in reality payment to the advantage of the ‘intellectual’ at the expense of physical, and especially unskilled, work – is a source of injustice, oppression and compulsions for the majority, privileges and a ‘happy life’ for the few.”

This statement of Trotsky’s: that wage labour in Russia still bears the humiliating label of wage slavery is of exceptional importance because of the horror of our Minority when we speak of wage slavery. Instead of frankly acknowledging that capitalist laws, and therefore capitalistic relations still exist in Russia, in fact are increasing and menacing the remaining socialistic forms of property, the Stalinists distort and hide the truth. They miseducate the working class as to the real material, dialectical, transition, by the use of reactionary sophisms.

Again let us repeat: the nationalisation of property transformed the situation for the worker only juridically. In reality – and we base ourselves on reality - the worker is compelled to sell his labour power and remains a wage slave. The revisionist conceptions of our Minority have nothing in common with Marxian economics. Ideologically it has its roots planted not in Trotskyism but in the sophisms of Stalinism.

The capitalistic character of the wage relation is repeatedly argued by Trotsky in the same book:

“The rouble is the ‘sole real means’ for the realisation of a capitalist principle of payment for labour, even though on the basis of socialist forms of property.”

On the same page – 81 – Trotsky says:

“Although at first glance the return of the Soviet Government, after the final and irrevocable triumph of socialism’ to piecework payment might seem a retreat to capitalist relations, in reality it is necessary to repeat here what was said about the rehabilitation of the ruble: It was not a question of renouncing socialism, but merely of abandoning crude illusions. The form of wage payment is simply brought into better correspondence with the real resources of the country. ‘Law can never be higher tan the economic structure.’”

At first glance it may seem a retreat to capitalist relations, Comrade Lawrence; in reality, the capitalist relations were there all the time, and it was simply a question of abandoning crude illusions. In these arguments of both Lenin and Trotsky the capitalistic nature of the wage relation (and especially the wage differential) is sufficiently clear to refute, in the most authoritative way, the false arguments of our comrades who deny the capitalistic nature of the wage relation. It is time for the Minority t abandon the crude illusions which are fitting to a miseducated Stalinist worker, but not to the cadre elements of te Fourth International.

THE STATE AS CAPITALIST – AND SURPLUS VALUE

Comrade Healy waved the “Revolution Betrayed” at the London aggregate to prove that the formulation in paragraph 2 of the CC resolution, which read as follows: “which (the state) occupies the same position in relation to the national economy as the capitalist occupies in relation to the single enterprise.” was torn out of context, and thus a forgery. Read the whole section, said Comrade Healy, and you will see that this refers to the subjective factor: to the personal ability and qualities of the bureaucracy to direct the state industries. Phrasemongering is one of the worst ailments that can affect a revolutionary. Here is an example of how Comrade Healy swallowed the phrase but did not understand the content.

In the CC resolution we explain that the payment of wage labour, commodity production, and the circulation of money, are capitalistic relations and given the state that defends those relations, capitalist characteristics. All the modifications that it is theoretically and practically essential to make, are made in Paragraph 3. For the purpose of drawing conclusions from these relationships, we are a hundred times correct to say that the state occupies the same relationship to the national economy as the capitalist occupies in relation to the single enterprise. Trotsky explains in the “Revolution betrayed” that the functions of money as capital, usurious, commercial and industrial, are transferred to the state (the universal merchant, creditor, and industrialist) in a modified form.

The transfer of the means of the production to the state, insofar as it does not lead immediately to socialist production and distribution, also transfers the function of the capitalist to the state. The elimination of individual capitals and the competition and anarchy of individual production modify these functions to a considerable degree. But the state is the controller of capital; it is the controller of money; it is the controller of the ms of commodities – the products of the working class; the state pays the wages of the worker; it hires him, fires him, and tells him what to produce and how to produce it, and where to produce it. In all these functions it occupies the same elation to the national economy as the individual capitalist occupies in relation to the single enterprise. Modification of the capitalist function of the state in the sphere of both production and distribution, which the workers were still able to bring about at one time through the pressure of workers control - even these modifications are no longer operative. The anti-socialistic nature of the state – its capitalistic nature, is therefore reinforced.

The worker must work to live. He has access to the means of production only through, and with the benevolence of the state. The state pays the worker, not for 8 hours of labour, but say for 4 hours of labour (more or less, but certainly not the full value of his labour). In this way it pays the worker on outright capitalist lines and with an outright capitalist measure, less than the value he produces. On the other hand it sells the worker “goods” (!) which he can buy only from the state at their full value, or more precisely: above their value. Surplus value is piled up, therefore, just as in capitalist countries. State production and trading in Russia reveals itself to be much closer to a gigantic “truck shop” than to communist or socialist society. This is especially true because of the bureaucratic control.

The statements of the Minority comrades (Goldburg and Goffe in particular) that there is no appropriation of surplus value in Russia, is really too absurd for words. There is no confusion of terms here but a specific denial that surplus value is extracted from the labour of the workers as social phenomenon. Not only does the Russian state appropriate surplus value, but it extracts a bigger proportion of surplus value than is extracted from the workers by the capitalists in the capitalist countries. Proof? Look at the rate of capital accumulation in Russia and compare it to the rate of capital accumulation in any other part of the world. For years we have pointed to the fact that this is the most gigantic and rapid capital development in history. Apart from the elimination of all the waste and destruction of commodities which arises from capitalist competition, which is very important and a definite tremendous social advance, the accumulation takes place, not by accident, but on the basis of economic laws established by Karl Marx. This is a necessary accumulation, and with certain modifications – which would result from a democratically and not bureaucratically directed plan – would take place in a healthy workers’ state.

But what of the economic surplus devoured by the bureaucracy? This surplus is as great, if not greater, than the surplus consumed by the ruling class (and its bureaucracy) in capitalist society. To control and devour this surplus, the bureaucracy waged a ruthless war against the Kulak and the small industrialists of the NEP. It continues to wage a ruthless war against the remnants of these elements at the present time. Even within the ranks of the bureaucracy itself, a struggle goes on for the distribution of this surplus, it oppresses the masses with ever greater brutality.

The bureaucracy is concerned with protecting and defending state property only for one reason: because on the basis of state property, with the state controlled in the bureaucratic vise, and the production and distribution relations that result from this situation, it is able to devour a growing portion of the surplus product of the national labour.

THE FORM OF EXPLOITATION CARRIED ON BY THE BUREAUCRACY

The denial by the Minority comrades that the bureaucracy, through their control of the state machine and thus their control of production, exploit the workers economically, is really ludicrous.

Lenin, when introducing the policy of paying the specialists high salaries, explained that these high salaries were a form of tribute. People who have the capacity to extract “tribute” from the mass of the producers are also, thereby, able to exploit.

This exploitation is not, however, exploitation which arises from the ownership of the means of production, and therefore cannot be defined scientifically as class exploitation, which is based upon the ownership of means of production and property. It is exploitation which exists on the basis of state ownership of the means of production, and arises from the backwardness of Russian technique and culture; upon the basis of the division of labour and bureaucratic control. No group that has control of the distribution of the articles of consumption ever forgets itself. Inherent in the very conception of bureaucratic control is the conception of inequality, and this of exploitation.

The ability to extract “tribute”, and to defend privileges because of their special position in the division of labour and control of the state machine, means that the bureaucracy has access to the best products designed to satisfy human needs and desires. All this is topped by the most degrading and revolting form of exploitation: the buying into personal service of the labour of the workers!

Frederick Engels once explained that political power is also an economic power. “Force”, he wrote , “(that is state power) is also an economic power.” It is for this reason that the proletariat struggles for the political dictatorship of the proletariat.

Once the power has passed out of the hands of the proletariat – into the hands of the bureaucracy; once the workers no longer control the state, and the economy of the country is no longer subject to workers’ control, without a new revolution, in the long run the triumph of capitalism is inevitable.

In addition to the bureaucratic exploitation that arises from the division of labour, however, a growing section of the bureaucracy is more and more occupying a place in Russian life that has an entirely capitalist relation: extracting surplus value from the labour of the producers through money investment. To deny the existence of this fact or to deny the class character of the function, is to desert Marxian economics altogether.

According to Marx, as we have noted previously: in the first stages of socialist society, bourgeois right still exists in relation to the distribution of the means of consumption, but, as the result of the social character of production, “nothing can pass into the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption.” It is clear that in Russia, however, that if this situation existed theoretically in the war communist stages of the revolution, it certainly is not true today. Money in Russia is something more than a mere measure of value. It is something more than a means of consumption. To perform the function of mere measure of value contributed in one form to society, and thus a measure of the means of consumption that may be drawn to repay that contribution, a labour certificate would be sufficient. Money could be replaced by any other token.

Because of the backwardness of the technique, however, the Bolsheviks were forced to retain the old capitalist elations on this score too. In his notes for the draft of the revised programme of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin speaks of “while (temporarily) not abolishing money…”. The Bolsheviks tried only to impose certain administrative measures to prevent money functioning in its most vicious form of private capital.

In the conditions of Russian society, therefore, money remains what it is in capitalist society: “the social incarnation of human labour, the real measure of labour, the general means of circulation.” Al the administrative regulations that have been introduced have already been - or are being – amended one after another so that money may find its expression as usurious capital. Money in Russia, not used up in exchange for means of consumption, is accumulated as savings. Savings in the state banks, which return an interest of 2.5%, savings which are invested in state bonds at 4% or more, are something more than means of consumption: they are usurious capital, or “interest bearing” capital.

We are not referring to the few miserable roubles that the workers are compelled to save by state regulation or state pressure; such savings have similar social characteristics to the savings of workers in capitalist countries. We refer to the voluntary savings of the bureaucrats, the managers and technicians, the intellectuals and the scientists; to those elements in Soviet society who earn 30, 40 and 50 and more times the wage of the average worker. These savings, returning an interest which is extracted from the surplus value created by the workers, function as interest bearing capital and introduces a new social (class) relationship that did not exist in the past.

A complete analysis of the various forms of state loan is extremely interesting but not essential to this discussion. For the purpose of attracting or “catching up” as great an amount of “surplus” cash that exists in the hands of the workers and which cannot be exchanged for commodities, the state issues the lottery loan. As a rule these loans are not interest bearing. They operate like a sweepstake; but with this difference that the ticket money is returnable after a certain number of years. The prizes in high sums of money go to the lucky ticket holders, being drawn from the interest that would accrue from the invested ticket money as a whole.

The “middle class” or “upper middle class” (note the parenthesis, please comrades) type of investors are offered more favorable terms for the loan of their money. To them the various state loans pay, as a general rule, a higher interest than is paid in developed capitalist countries on state bonds. The Chairman of Lloyds Bank made a statement in his annual report some years before the outbreak of war, that those Russian binds were among the most stable and highest interest paying government bonds in the world. It is interesting to note in this connection, that the more stable the Russian regime became, the less Russian economy became an economy of crisis, the lower the interest paid out on money loaned – the rate of interest dropped – as it drops in capitalist economy.

However, these questions, dealing as they do with the development of this aspect of the capitalist relations need not be subjected to a complete investigation for the purpose of this discussion; nor, unfortunately, for that matter, are they capable of complete investigation in view of the almost total absence of figures for a number of years.

It is necessary only to draw the attention of the comrades to the fact that the “bourgeois state” – as distributor – now begins to assume additional bourgeois characteristics in other aspects of its functioning – as producer. For this policeman protects not only the capitalistic privileges and rights in distribution, but also protects the growing capitalist –directly exploitative – relations in production; and has introduced al the necessary laws – saving laws, investment laws, etc – to make this protection a perfectly legal function. The social differentiation which arises from the growing differentiation in the payment prepares the conditions for a class transformation even in relation to the last remaining conquests of 1917.

WHAT IS NEW

The bureaucrat, as a bureaucrat, whose livelihood depends upon his position in the productive or distributive process and thus in the division of labour itself, performs a different social function from the bureaucrat as investor in state bonds. In the former case, bureaucrat as bureaucrat: his social function and access to products of consumption is essentially dependent upon the political control of the state machine and on his contribution of labour in one form or another to the social pool. In this case the parasitic function of the bureaucrat, his lack of a stable economic base is clear: he is hired and fired according to the shifts that take place within the ranks of the bureaucracy as a whole, and has no guarantee for the future – for himself or his family.

But with the growing development of bureaucrat as investor, a new (class) relation to the means of production has commenced. Part of his livelihood depends, no longer upon his privileged position in the state machine or the division of labour, but upon invested money, money as capital, and the interest that accrues from that invested capital.

In the “Revolution Betrayed” Trotsky wrote:

“One may argue that the bureaucrat cares little what are the prevailing forms of property, provided only they guarantee him the necessary income. This ignores not only the instability of the bureaucrat’s own rights, but also the question of his descendents… Privileges have only half their worth if they cannot be transmitted to one’s children. It is not enough to be the director of a trust; it is necessary to be a stockholder. The victory of the bureaucracy in this decisive sphere would mean its conversion into a new possessing class.” (Our emphasis – JH)

The bureaucracy, as such, has not formed itself into a new possessing class. To say that it has is un-Marxist and scientifically unsound, insofar as Marxism bases itself on the division of labour and the ownership of property as the basis of classes. But it is clear that out of the ranks of the bureaucracy there is being exuded a new possessing class, which: 1) has gained a definitely new and more privileged position in relation to the means of production and the distribution of national wealth; and, 2) has consolidated these new privileges of a directly capitalist character, and can pass them down to their families through the bourgeois right of testament. This aspect of the degeneration has not been sufficiently investigated by us, and in view of the new laws that have been introduced legalizing the inheritance of money investments, is clearly a subject to which our movement will have t devote more attention.

In drawing attention to this factor as a subject for serious scientific investigation and constant review, the Central Committee resolution is one hundred percent imbued with the spirit of the Marxist movement as it has existed for a century.

Merely to demonstrate the facts and subject them to Marxian economic analysis, is to refute the un-Marxian denial by our Minority that the Russian working class is economically exploited by the bureaucracy.

Let our Minority weep and wail that to poke our nose into this subject is to begin a new “revision”. We are far from afraid that the Marxist method is s faulty that we cannot investigate such a new and fundamentally important phenomenon. But let them deny the facts. Let them not revise all Marxist conceptions of economics because they fear such investigation. These questions are taboo for them only because they have swallowed the phrases without assimilating the ideas and methods of Marxism, and above all, because they are afraid of the new phenomenon.

This form of accumulation, of course, has been present since the early days of the Russian Revolution and was recognized as a peculiar form of state capitalism. But it undoubtedly had a different social weight and significance in the early days than it is gaining today. It appears to the writer that this form of accumulation has much greater dangers to the socialist future of Russia than the primitive accumulation that takes place in the countryside and in the free market.

If one takes into consideration the historical tendencies towards stratification on a world scale, and the fact that Russian stratification survived the test of a tremendous war, it seems theoretically correct to assume that there is no reason why a new capitalist class in Russia cannot arise and dominate the economic life of the country without destroying state property as such; but on the contrary, through investments in state bonds. If the present investment and inheritance trend continues, it is possible for sate property to be transformed into a juridical function, while in reality, a new class of money capitalists, of rentiers who batten on the labour of the working class, have taken over the means of production.

Trotsky believed that failing a new proletarian political revolution, the bourgeois norms of distribution would lead to the break-up of the state trusts which would be converted into privately owned trusts. He did not believe that a class of “state capitalists” would arise on the basis of state property in Russia. Nevertheless, he formulated his ideas with sufficient elasticity so as not to exclude even this form of degeneration. In the “Revolution Betrayed” he wrote:

“to the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, if (the state – JH) carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration. This contrast between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot grow indefinitely. Either the bourgeois norms must in one form or another spread to the means of production, or the norms of distribution must be brought into correspondence with the socialist property system.”

This idea is further elaborated in the section of the “Revolution Betrayed” under the sub-head: “THE QUESTION OF THE CHARACTER OF THE SOVIET UNION NOT YET DECIDED BY HISTORY.” In opposing the theory that the Russian bureaucracy could be characterized in 1936 as a class of state capitalists, Trotsky argued that:

“…The bureaucracy has not yet created social supports for its domination in the form of special types of property. It is compelled to defend state property as the source of its power and its income. In this aspect of its activity it still remains a weapon of proletarian dictatorship.

“The attempt to represent the Soviet bureaucracy as a class of ‘state capitalists’ will obviously not withstand criticism. The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited, supplemented and renewed in the manner of an administrative hierarchy, independently of any special property relations of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus…”

The evolution of Russian society, however, shows that the “special form of property” evolved by the bureaucracy is precisely “state property.” State stocks or bonds which bring back an interest of 4% are undoubtedly property “of a special type”. Moreover, the individual bureaucrat can now “transmit to his heirs” the rights “to the exploitation” of state property through these interest bearing bonds.

History has not, however, had its final word to say on the question of whether a new capitalist class can stabilize itself on the basis f this form of property. It has, nevertheless, clearly testified to the fact that the bureaucracy seeks every legal, as well as illegal means to enlarge its share of the surplus product; to consolidate its privileges for generations by incorporating these privileges into the legal structure of the country.

Meanwhile, the numerical growth and cultural development of the proletariat prepares the forces which in the long run, is certain to come into revolutionary collision with the bureaucracy. It is not possible at the present stage, to give a final and conclusive answer as to how the social antagonism between the two class forces will develop in the curse of the next decade. The outcome depends upon the clash of living forces, not only in Russia, but on the arena of the international class struggle.

2007-11-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

Electoral Slates and Joint Slates
by Duncan Hallas

Socialist Workers Party Bulletin No 3 May 1977

Introduction by neprimerimye

The following article by Duncan Hallas, a founder of the Socialist Review Group in 1950 and for many years a leader of International Socialists, does not appear on the Marxist Internet Archive. It is a fascinating document which reveals much about both the SWP and its rival groups nearly thirty years ago. A reading of this article is a useful exercise in debunking much of the accumulated bunkum of the intervening years.

The article is also extremely funny when read with the benefit of hndsight as it is replete with considerable ironies. For example in reference to the unity mongers of the International Maggot Group (IMG) Hallas talks of them placing the emphasis of their politics on many varied social groups but not on the working class to whch they paid lip service as supposed marxists. In particular Hallas subjects the IMG to some ridicule with regard to its front groups in Scotland and in Birmingham amongst the Asian population. Given that the SWP of today has adopted the IMG's position on Scotland, worse it tails Scottish nationalism in the form of Tommy Sheridans personal project 'Solidarity', and panders to a communalism more reactionary than that of the Asian Socialist League one can only wonder what the author would have to say today if his younger self were confronted with such a blatant political degeneration.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of the article is that it stands as an effective polemic against the SWP's turn to electoralism, with the still born Socialist Alliance, and more recently to a grotesque populism with the misnamed Respect. The strident tone of the piece should not be neglected however and detracts from the essays considerable merits as an educational piece. This almost hysterical tone can only be explained in reference to the factional struggles that had rent IS in the years immediately prior to the foundation of the SWP. A subject this blog will without doubt return to in the future.

*** *** ***

Some comrades have asked if we should reconsider our attitude towards an electoral pact with other organisations on the revolutionary left.

In practice, this is only raised in connection with the IMG, since the other organisations which have run candidates in the past, the WRP, etc, are not interested. The IMG, on the other hand, is making the issue a central feature of its propaganda and is directing 90 per cent of this propaganda at SWP members and sympathisers.

At Stechford, IMG members distributed leaflets at Paul Foot's meetings which deplored competition between Foot and Heron (the IMG candidate) and concluded; "the IMG repeats its call to the SWP to discuss with us the possibility of united far-left slates in the coming elections and especially in the General Election. All socialists will pay a price for needless disunity in the future." They had previously called for a joint candidate in Stechford, a joint slate in GLC elections and so on.

Well, why not? We are certainly in favour of joint action with everyone in the working class movement, whether Labour Party members, CP members, independents or whatever to fight the fascists, to fight hospital closures, to fight the Social Contract and so on and so forth - always provided it is action. We do not, however, form blocs to make propaganda. We put forward our own ideas in our own paper.

The distinction is obvious enough. Unity in action with everyone who can be pulled in to support the particular action, irrespective of their views on other matters. Independent expression of our own ideas at all times. We don't stay out of any genuine working class struggle and we don't make our participation conditional on others agreeing with us. At the same time, we don't hide or dilute our politics or pretend to be other than we are.

How does this apply to parliamentary etc. elections?

Revolutionary intervention in parliamentary elections at present is essentially a propaganda operation, a means of contacting people and involving them in some of our activities and of recruiting.

We judge our success (or failure) in a contest by members recruited, contacts made, SW readers gained and so on and not mainly by votes gained.

Of course, it is very pleasing if we get a better than expected vote, a little disappointing if we get a lower than expected vote. But it is not the main thing. We are not parliamentary roaders.

Even in circumstances where there is a serious prospect of winning a particular contest this remains true. It would be very useful for propaganda and, indeed, agitational purposes to have a revolutionary MP, or even better to have several.

But this will always be secondary to building the party in the workplaces, to fighting for leadership in the day to day struggles of working people and inside the unions.

Our aim in contesting parliamentary elections is to build the SWP. We do not put the emphasis on getting the biggest possible vote for the 'far-left'.

Protest votes, and that is what is being spoken of, are not without significance, but they are incomparably less important than building the party.

Where does this leave us with respect to the IMG? Since many of our members do not come into contact with this organisation, it may be useful to say a little about it.

The IMG regards itself as a Trotskyist organisation and is affiliated to the biggest of the various bodies claiming to be 'the Fourth International'. It claims top have 680 members. Some of these - I do not know what proportion - operate inside the Labour Party as 'entrists'.

The IMG differs from us politically on a number of matters; for example, it regards Russia, China, etc, as workers' states, although degenerated or deformed and it is keen on slogans like 'the sliding scale of wages', 'open the books' and so on.

But, the most important difference, I believe, is not these disagreements, but the approach to building the revolutionary party. The IMG puts the emphasis on building blocs, fronts, alliances etc with other organisations, and what it calls 'the broad vanguard' (ie unaffiliated left wingers) and within these blocs etc it hopes to establish its own 'hegemony' - meaning dominance. It hopes to dominate a sort of left coalition which will develop, it hopes, into a party.

The IMG regards the SWP as the biggest obstacle in its path - rightly so in view of the relationship of forces - and tries hard to use other (non-IMG) people to put pressure on us. For unless the growth of the SWP can be checked, their strategy can't work.

Thus it has set up a Socialist Teachers Alliance in opposition to Rank and File Teacher )from which the IMG teachers split). The STA includes a fair number of non-IMG people, mostly to the right of the IMG, and, having come out of split, denounces R&F people as 'sectarians' and 'splitters'.

"The time has come", says a writer in a recent issue of the IMG's paper "for the SWP/R&F to break out of its sectarian politics, acknowledge the STA as a force with equal, if not greater influence both in London and nationally, and unite to win a massive vote....etc." But we were united in R&F until they split.

In fact, the STA is an unstable alliance held together by a dislike of unofficial action and hostility to the SWP. Its leaders regard R&F as tending to 'adventurism' - as in the 'no-cover' campaign - and put nearly all their emphasis on work in the union machine. It runs candidates against R&F candidates in union elections.

After the recent NUT conference, the IMG paper claimed that the STA had definitely replaced R&F as 'the main tendency' on the left and had had 50 delegates (15 recruited at conference). The real significance of the conference was the decisive victory of the right on, all issues. The STA is, to some degree, an adaptation to right wing dominance, a soft option for soft lefts.

Similarly, a Socialist Students Alliance has been set up (on much the same basis) as a rival to NOISS, and the IMG paper tells us "the SSA has now replaced NOISS as the major force after the Broad Left", a claim as hollow as those made for other 'fronts' the IMG has sponsored over the years.

The SSA ran its own slate against NOISS (as well as the Broad Left and the Tories) at the recent NUS conference.

There is no Socialist Engineers Alliance or Socialist Electricians Alliance but that is only because the IMG has few people in industry (although they do support the 'independent Broad Left' paper Engineering Voice against Engineering Charter). In the recent TGWU's General Secretary election the IMG called for a vote for Thornett, not Riley.

Where the IMG has no possibility of setting up a rival organisation, it often 'supports' SWP efforts. The Right to Work Campaign is a good example and it is not unfair to say that IMG 'support' for the Right to Work marches last year was of the sort Lenin called 'support as the rope supports the man being hanged'.

For weeks on end, the IMG paper carried attacks from all and sundry on the 'bureaucratic', 'sectarian' and of course, politically hopeless RTW leadership, complete with atrocity stories. Red Weekly sees this sort of thing as unimportant. Nearly every issue contains attacks on the SWP (three per issue is the norm) alongside calls for 'unity'! Compare the absence of attacks on the IMG in Socialist Worker.

In spite of our forbearance, they continually denounce the SWP as 'sectarian'!

Now we learn that the IMG is going to launch a new weekly paper called Socialist Challenge which will also serve its various front organisations - these now include a Scottish Socialist League and an Asian Socialist League (in Birmingham) as well as the various Alliances and the IMG members in the Labour Party. It will, so Red Weekly tells us, "be a non-sectarian polemical paper". There are no prizes for guessing who most of the polemics will be aimed at!

Some of our comrades understandably get indignant about this kind of thing, but we should not take it too seriously. It does us little damage, but to reply in kind would do us much more damage. And it will not build the IMG.

Hiding your politics, sailing under false colours, never builds in the long run.

The 'electoral unity' proposals have to be seen against this background.

What the IMG has in mind is not a practical arrangement that seeks to avoid, or at any rate minimize, the Stechford type situation of two far-left candidates. What they are after is, as they admit, a 'joint-slate', a common platform and a united campaign - and not only an electoral one.An article in Red Weekly on the French municipal election agreement between far-left groups puts the line very clearly: "while Lutte Ouvriere initially saw the agreement as requiring only joint electoral work, the LCR (the French IMG) correctly insisted on the need for a national joint platform...

Our comrades also argued for joint activity to extend beyond the electoral arena, to build the implantation of the revolutionary organisations".

Now this is nonsense. Either there is basic agreement about building the party - in which case the organisations ought to unite in a single party - or there is not, in which case they cannot 'build the implantation'. How can we build jointly with the IMG when, wherever they have the strength, they build blocs against us with forces to the right of us? To repeat, we are out to build the revolutionary arty, not to maximise the vote by alliances Which hinder building.

Is actual unity feasible? The differences on Russia etc are, in principle, containable in a single democratic-centralist organisation provided that there is an agreed approach to building the party in the working class.

In the past, the IMG has put the emphasis on work everywhere except in the working class, but in the last few years it has changed its line and says it agrees with us on this.

Unfortunately, it has moved well to the right at the same time and thinks in terms of blocs with various 'independents' who have official positions, rather than building rank and file movements. Another problem is that the IMG is a coalition of permanent factions (they call them tendencies), a state of affairs they regard as positively desirable, and are not likely to accept democratic-centralism as we understand it. And, of course, they want to stay affiliated to their 'Fourth International'.

But the basic difficulty, I believe, is that most of them do not want unity at all but only 'unity manoeuvres' to try to strengthen themselves at our expense. Their problem is that we would have a huge majority in a united organisation. If we accept, as we must, that they seriously believe in their own political conceptions, then their attitude is understandable.

Understanding, however, is not the same thing as weakness and it would be both weak and extremely foolish to give countenance to these 'unity manoeuvres.'

The IMG has developed a theory to justify its peculiar tactics. This theory says that it is 'sectarian' to put the emphasis on building the revolutionary party. 'Unfortunately, the present sectarian course of the SWP placed the needs of their organisation above the best interests of the working class," says the Red Weekly. This goes down well with people who like to be on the left but don't want to commit themselves to an organisation. It is not so new either.

Years ago Trotsky wrote of the SAP, a left breakaway from the German Social Democrats, that when they "criticise the 'party egoism' of the Social-Democracy and of the Communist Party; when Seydewitz (an SAP leader) assures us that so far as he is concerned 'the interests of the class come before the interests of the party,' they only fall into political sentimentalism or, what is worse, behind this sentimental phraseology they screen the interests of their own party. This method is no good... The interests of the class cannot be formulated otherwise than in the shape of a programme, the programme cannot be defended otherwise than by creating the party."

That is our position and it used to be the position of the IMG too. "We start from a profound conviction that the problem of carrying out a social transformation in Britain requires above all the building of a mass revolutionary party," wrote Pat Jordan, then National Secretary of the IMG, in 1969; "We regard the present fragmentation of the left as arising from the lack of such a party. Once the process of building the revolutionary party proceeds beyond its embryonic stage - that is when a given tendency clearly established its hegemony in theory and practice - regroupment will commence."

This was written, in part, to defend the IMG's rejection of the IS proposal to unite the two organisations into a single party which was our policy in 1968 and 1969. In those days, they believed that they could build their organisation faster and better than ours could be built. then we would unite when they had the majority.

In the event, we built and they did not - they are little stronger now than they were then. One reason is that we turned our backs on sectarian bickering and they did not.

Jordan also dealt, in this article on Unity and Sectarianism, with the sort of approach the IMG now has, the method of blocs and alliances: "such a project is fraught with dangers. It is one thing to organise a campaign on a single issue such as Vietnam, where for revolutionaries the issue is so clear cut, but another thing once one attempts to cover a whole series of questions, each of which can give rise to political and tactical differences."

This was directed against various 'independents' and 'New Lefts' who wanted a bloc rather than a party.

The IMG has changed its line because of our growth, its marked inferiority to the SWP and its unwillingness to go for real unity. An electoral bloc of the sort they propose is not on. Submerging the SWP in some 'front' is out of the question. We fight under our own colours.

There is a fundamental issue involved. We know that the revolutionary party can only be built by involvement in workers' struggles. In these terms the IMG is irrelevant in most cases. They believe that the way forward is argument - polemic is the word they use - about policies between people who regard themselves as revolutionaries. We left that kind of thing behind years ago.

2007-10-29T21:24:00.000-07:00

Britains Sovereignity Endangered by Religious Loons!!!

(A Neprimerimye exclusive - and no wonder!!!)

Comrades and friends we here at neprimerimye blog are alarmed by the threat to the national sovereignity of Britain uncovered in the Sunday telegraph that well known organ of braindead conservatism. Uncovered but unremarked upon by the pusilanimous defenders of british nationalism on that rotten diseased organ. But we at Neprimerimye, pledged as we are to defend those few remanants of bourgeois democracy remaining in this the period of capitalism's historic decline, will spare no efforts to explain to the masses this new threat to liberty on these here islands. And so we hand you over to the combined efforts of our religious and consitutional departments for your enlightenment.

We note that in the Sunday Telegraph of 28/10/07ce an article by Jonathan Wynne-Jones appeared entitled 'Parishes win right to turn to foreign bishops'. On the face of it this so-called right allows parishes, that is to say local branches of the state cult in England, to secede from the control of the local diocese and adhere instead to another diocese based in Africa or South America. The reason for this being that some of the parishes of the Church of England, the aforementioned state cult, dislike the 'liberal' attitude of the state cult with regard to sexual ethics. Suffice it to say the state cult is not exactly at the cutting edge but is far too radical for the more traditional churchmen.

Normally these moves would excite but little comment by us here at neprimerimye blog but we note that an important principle of Britain's constitution seems to have been raised, namely the matter of our national sovereignity. Not that we at neprimerimye would raise so much as a digit to defend The Church of Engerland or national sovereignity in the normal course of events. But in this case we note that the principle of the sovereignity of Parliament is threatened and we are alarmed!!! What next? Will the right of the freeborn Englisher to beat his children and wife be sacrificed at the alter of trendiness?

We here at neprimeimye blog say NO, this cannot be. It is the right of all Britons to demand that these bigots remain under the iron heel of Dr Rowan Williams and be compelled to thereby to recognise the sovereignity of the Queen in Parliament. We note that it is after all the case that on these here septic isles that sovereignity is derived not from the people as such but from the authority the monarch delegates to the representatives of the people gathered together in Parliament. And the Queen is, as our learned reader will know, the head of the state cult which is to say of the Church in Engerland.

It follows from the above that should any parish of the Church in Engerland be removed from the control of Dr Williams that our national sovereignity is thereby diminished. This, in the opinion of neprimerimye blog, is an outrage against the people of Engerland and our sovereign lady Queen Liz. Although the problem could be easily solved by disestablishing the Church of England - but that would be crazy.

2007-09-06T19:36:00.000-07:00

Blob Expires

Need more be said? Turgid stuff opera innit?

2007-09-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Comrades,

The exchange on your website concerning Left Communism and Trotskyism was of very real interest to me in light of the degeneration of most of the self proclaimed adherents of both currents into opportunism, sectarianism or both. A degeneration which, in my opinion, has twofold roots in the isolation of revolutionaries from a workers’ movement alive to the realities of the class war and in the theoretical errors made by the various groups. As Loren pointed out these weaknesses are to a considerable degree related to how the October Revolution and its degeneration are understood although I am also of the opinion that the different analyses of that revolution can also be related to the failure of the Communist International, as a whole, to break from the mechanism of Kautsky and the Second International, a legacy which can still be identified to some greater or lesser degree within the Left Communist and Trotskyist groups alike.

In the remarks which follow I would like to take up various points previously raised in your discussion. To a considerable degree I shall relate my remarks in general to the specific development of the Socialist Workers Party (Britain) and its organisational forerunner the International Socialists in Post-War Britain. In this way I hope to be able to bring the experience of that tendency, in both its negative and positive aspects, to your attention. In addition to which I shall use that experience to illustrate the importance of revolutionary theory to the development of a revolutionary workers movement in the aftermath of the defeat of October and the marginalisation of revolutionary ideas after 1948.

To begin I would like to argue that October is still vitally important for revolutionaries and if Loren’s telling of discussions in Korea are indicative It is most alive in those few places where a mass workers’ movement exists and struggles. That is no accident and is very simply explicable by the existence of a combative section of our class in South Korea. That the debate in Korea takes the form it does speaks to the importance of forms of Marxism imported and transformed into ideology. Revolutionaries today are obliged to strip such ideologies, often ‘party’ ideologies, of all that is redundant and outdated in them and apply Marxism to the ideological Marxism of the Marxists in order to recaste Marxism as a method of analyses that informs revolutionary practice.

In order to approach this task, a task that has or should have been central to the work of revolutionary communists since the degeneration of the Comintern, we need in the first place to reject all Marxism’s that substitute forces alien to the proletariat, hence the continued centrality of the Russian experiment. For only those forces which reject in its totality the monstrous bureaucratic cancer that we call Stalinism, but is better described as bureaucratic state capitalism, in their practice and hopefully in their theory too, will in the future be capable of contributing towards a revolutionary workers movement. I place the emphasis here not on the theory of the individuals and groups but on their practice which ought to be of paramount importance for us but is so often relegated to the background of the stale polemics which rage in all their impotent fury on the far left.

When discussing the early days of the Comintern and the revolutionary wave of 1916 - 1923 from the perspective of everyday life in the comfortable and exceedingly stable advanced ‘democracies’ it is amusingly easy for revolutionary intellectuals, possessed of the more or less complete works of the revolutionary ‘greats’ as well as detailed knowledge of the ‘lessons of history’, to miss the point entirely. Rather than understand the events of that time and the development of the Comintern in its earliest period as an attempt to cohere the revolutionary vanguard both organisationally and theoretically we are presented with various orthodoxies. As you would expect with any orthodoxy what is presented is not a method of analysis but a set of positions raised to the level of items of faith from which the faithful dare not dissent on pain of excommunication.

Any such orthodoxy, however right and true to its tradition it might be, cannot but fail to rise to the level of proletarian science in the sense that by excluding insights from rival, equally orthodox, traditions it is forced to abjure many of the most creative insights into the nature of bourgeois society by reason of the thinker or current in question not cleaving to one’s own tradition or version of orthodoxy. This cannot but result in the development not of fighting propaganda groups, as many such organisations style themselves, but of confessional sects which crash and burn when reality shatters one or other element of their carefully constructed orthodoxy. This is true as much of Left Communist as of Trotskyist groups and for that matter, in their own often eclectic fashion, of the class struggle anarchist and syndicalist groups too.

It is all too easy for isolated revolutionary intellectuals and workers to cry out, to but little echo fortunately, that what is needed is a new synthesis of all that remains relevant and truly revolutionary from the past. Easy perhaps but trite and superficial in that each and everyone of us has come out of pre-existing traditions/orthodoxies from which we are in revolt or, in some cases, fleeing from. In such circumstances and in the absence of a mass revolutionary workers movement any attempt at such a new synthesis will only result in scholastic exercises in eclecticism, as that which remains vital cannot be discerned from the dead chaff in today’s one dimensional world of apparent class peace. The same proposition may not be true in South Korea!

Nonetheless passing through those schools of revolutionary thought with all their limitations was necessary for each and everyone of us. What other alternative school was there in which we could gain some understanding of Marxism whilst working as part off a revolutionary project? Indeed where else can young workers and student youth gain even the beginning of an understanding of Marxism today if not as members of such groups? The only alternative that comes to mind is the higher education sector where it is possible for some students to learn something of Marxism but quite frankly what they learn is so distorted by all the muck of academic competition, by the various intellectual fads and by bourgeois distortion masquerading as objectivity that it is very often worse than useless.

At least in the groups young people can learn something of the continued relevance of revolutionary thought as it relates to the world of class struggle and social conflict. Although when such struggles are at a low ebb, as is the case in Britain today, the lessons learnt threaten to be as academic and abstract as any of the nonsense taught in the universities. The key to the development of Marxian ideas among young people is then the existence of a layer of class conscious workers in the groups and the groups orientation on the most advanced workers as workers and not as members of trades unions, reformist parties, etc. The groups then, whether they be Left Communist or Trotskyist is of little substantial importance, remain relevant only if their primary orientation is on the proletariat and they make some attempt to develop Marxist theory.

It is then because of what they do not what they claim to be that gives the groups some real importance. For this reason the various Trotskyist groups in Britain are of some real if highly marginal importance to the political life of the workers, at least in particular sections of the class, due to the work they actually do in sustaining what is a much shrunken workers movement from its heyday in the early 1970’s. First and foremost of these groups is the Socialist Workers Party which can claim to have some few thousands of members and some weight in a handful of unions. The trouble is that they are now a very long way away from what they once were having badly degenerated in recent years. Despite which due to the education a part of their members receive it cannot be excluded that at some point in the future that they will again swing to the left and readopt a more ‘workerist’ stance.

It is worthwhile remembering that the SWP, then known as the Socialist Review Group, began as a pretty ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist group differing only from the majority in the Fourth International as to their understanding of the Stalinist states which they saw as being bureaucratic state capitalist countries. It matters very little whether or not the analysis they, or rather Tony Cliff the deceased leader of the group, made of the Stalinist states is the definitive analysis. In fact any hunt for such an analysis is doomed to failure given that Marxism is not, or should not, be interested in answering such futile abstract questions, but is a method of understanding how bourgeois society functions in order to equip the proletariat with those ideas which will enable us to raze the political edifice erected on that base of that society to the ground in order to construct a human society. In this sense then Cliff’s ideas and those of other comrades influenced by him served the organisation well in enabling it to understand the profoundly counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism without slipping into the banal Stalinophobia of the Shachtmanites after 1948.

Interestingly core members of the International Socialists, as the group was known between 1962 and 1976, tended to supplement the writings of their own theoreticians with regard to Stalinism and not only read writers such as Castoriadis and Dunayevskaja but published and distributed their work too. At the same time their journal, International Socialism, gave space to the writings of Mattick and attempted to rescue the young Lukacs from neglect, an earlier attempt having been made by the Shactman group with which the British IS had an on again off again relationship. In addition they paid critical attention to Korsch and Reich. More importantly they encouraged and contributed to the rediscovery of revolutionary movements amongst the working classes in Britain itself paying particular attention to the Communist Party linked Minority Movement of the 1920’s and the shop stewards movement throughout the early years of the last century. Crucially their understanding of Stalinism as a bourgeois political form enabled them to reject Third Worldism, without slipping into sectarianism with regard to national liberation movements as was and is true of Lutte Ouvriere, and to insist on the centrality of the proletariat if such struggles were to move in the direction of a social revolution.

All of these vitally important gains arose due to the alleged ‘workerism’ that was an important feature of the group during the 1960’s and1970’s. But this so called ‘workerism’ came into being for two excellent reasons. On the one hand the theory of bureaucratic state capitalism enabled IS to develop a rejection of any substitutionist approach to socialist politics such as those touted at the time by its rivals in the supposedly more ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist groupings all of which were happy to accept that ‘workers states’, albeit ‘deformed workers states’, could come into being without the conscious agency of the proletariat itself. In fact this rejection of substitutionism went so far as to be applied to the thought of Trotsky himself in what for a grouping which saw itself as standing in the tradition of the Old Man, was an audacious move. On the other hand IS being deeply immersed in the British workers organisations and its then living traditions - to pretend that there is a living tradition of organising outside official union structures in Britain today as was true before the mid-1970’s is to succumb to fantasy - could not fail to understand the centrality of the working classes and specifically in Britain of the Shop Stewards.

Cliff’s theory of State Capitalism was then absolutely essential to every aspect of its work both theoretical and practical. Other than those aspects of its theory and practice which were simply lifted whole from the Fourth Internationalist movement I should add. Some leading members of the SWP today even argue that the groups work on the Permanent Arms Economy derives directly from his theory of State Capitalism. Fanciful in my view given that as we know it originated in the Shactmanite group and was only imported to Britain by Cliff. Fanciful, but indicative of the absolute centrality of the theory to the development of IS and sadly of the absolute centrality of Tony Cliff too! Cliff on one level might well have been central to the development of IS but he was as central to its degeneration from its highpoint as a revolutionary workers group in the early 1970’s as in an other deeper sense was the restructuring of capital in Britain from 1976 onwards.

It is easy to demonise individual leaders in the groups for their failures and errors. The existence of monsters such as Gerry Healy and freaks such as Lyn Marcus, for whom Loren has a regard that I find quite unfathomable, spring too readily to mind. But Cliff, although as an individual an oddity in post-war Britain, was no monster but a sincere and dedicated revolutionary. Which makes his role in the degeneration of IS all the more pathetic. That said it must be understood that the central role played by Cliff in both the rise and decline of IS could not have been played by any individual had the group been more rooted in decisive layers of the class. His role at bottom was a function of the marginality of IS even at its highpoint and was not the result of his personality as oppositional documents of the time come close to suggesting.

The damaging split within IS was rather a matter of genuine political error, only very partially resulting from the revolutionary impatience of Cliff, and the marginality of IS to the workers movement. Cliffs impatience can be dealt with swiftly for it was to a considerable degree the result of his quite correct desire to push forward the construction of IS and his entirely incorrect lack of patience with the long standing IS policy which argued that such a course of action meant developing roots in the most conscious layer of the class, that is to say amongst the shop stewards. Arguing for an orientation on new young workers, who never materialised it should be noted, as opposed to the older bureaucratised militants once he met resistance in the leading circles of IS to his proposal Cliff was forced to wage an unprincipled factional struggle to push the group in the desired direction. With the result that by the end of 1976 a large part of the organisations slim base in engineering had quit as had a layer of leading comrades.

The comrades who had been expelled or quit would fail to thrive in the following period as however correct the policy of building a revolutionary group through the shop stewards movement might have been in earlier years we were now at the turning point of post-war politics and it was no longer enough. Ironically it was the majority, who had been wrong on all substantial issues in the factional struggle, who were to grow in the coming period. Symbolically however they were to abandon the old name of their group and adopt a new one relaunching as the Socialist Workers Party as 1976 passed into history and 1977 dawned.

But the growth of the SWP was almost a matter of luck and determination rather than a result of a planned political intervention. With progress stymied on the industrial front as monetarism was introduced by Denis Healey and factory closures loomed large recruitment came not from patiently planned contact work but from campaigns discovered almost by accident. In short the SWP stumbled upon mass campaigning work when it launched the Right to Work Campaign to combat growing youth employment later followed by the incredibly successful Anti Nazi League. Young working class youth were recruited in droves by these initiatives but more often than not they were unemployed. Lacking roots in the workplaces and traditions the new recruits were all too often voting fodder for the leadership around Cliff and by the end of 1981 open opposition, even on tactical questions, was ended in the SWP as various leading figures drifted away in demoralisation and disillusionment.

By the end of 1981 the SWP was a completely different group to the old IS, even if some of the older leaders remained at the helm, and its long slow degeneration was well underway. A process that has speeded up since the demise of Cliff it is true but was largely his work. Nonetheless that failure to build a revolutionary workers alternative was not simply a result of faulty perspectives and revolutionary impatience it was also the result of failure at a theoretical level. Here I have to take issue with Yves who seemed to not only reject the Transitional Program, a document best considered an historical curiosity at this remove, but the transitional method of raising aims which relate to the present consciousness of workers and to the goal of the seizure of state power by the workers as a step towards the creation of a human society. Yves is correct, of course, that in a period of relative class peace characterized by superabundance that the specific demands raised in the Transitional Program are of little or no utility to revolutionaries. But does this invalidate the method, common to all those Marxist factions - other than the Left Communists - who look towards the early days of the Comintern and not just to Trotskyists, which provides the theoretical foundations of the Transitional Program? The error of the IS in not formally adopting a document based on that method illustrates for me the error of such a proposition.

As I wrote above the IS began as a self consciously ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist group differing from the majority of the then undivided Fourth International only as to its analysis of the Stalinist states. This included adherence to the idea of transitional politics although after 1954 the group decisively rejected any idea of a slump occurring for an extended period of time with the corollary that they also rejected the idea that revolutionary demands could be raised in an agitational fashion in the then foreseeable future. By the early 1970’s they had long abandoned any overt reference to the Transitional Program or indeed to the short program they had carried in Socialist Review from 1955 onwards. Not because they rejected the underlying method, far from it, but because they recognised that in a period characterised by sectional struggles that did not rise to the level of a systemic challenge to the rule of capital transitional demands proper were not appropriate and simply did not fit the times. Critically all this was accepted by much of the group prior to its rapid growth from 1968 but was not elaborated in the form of theory other than in fragmentary form as with references to the, also unelaborated, concept of the ‘changing locus of reformism’.

But what worked for a small group of under five hundred members before 1968 did not work so well for the more heterogeneous IS of the early 1970’s which contained large numbers of young people eagerly devouring the works of Trotsky and seeing his tactical recipes as the last word in revolutionary virtue. The problem was not that the newer members looked to the ideas of Trotsky for inspiration, they had that in common with the older comrades, but that the leadership were unable to educate the membership in the method of Marxism and that what educational development did take place was a ‘cadre training’ exercise that was carried out through the prism of a necessarily limited factional interpretation of the Marxist tradition. And this from a grouping that saw itself as post-Trotskyist and had made great efforts to rescue the thought of Rosa Luxemburg from neglect let us not forget. That said how a small rapidly growing group can educate an unstable membership as to the methods and principles of Marxism that has never been answered in the realm of practice.

The result of the increasing level of class struggle, which saw ever larger confrontations and was by 1969 heavily politicised, saw an ongoing debate within IS as to the need for a transitional program and by 1973 the group was actively engaged in the drafting of such a program. In fact the draft, unsatisfactory though it clearly was to all concerned, was eventually adopted only to disappear over the horizon with the developing factional strife within the group. What should be noted is that even though most of the leadership, including those who would soon depart the groups ranks, were reluctant to adopt such a program it was accepted in principle that such a document was needed to summarise the aims and strategic conceptions of the organisation. And so it was as long as there was no lapse into the fantasy that Britain in 1974 was on the brink of a pre-revolutionary situation and what was needed was the raising of slogans designed for such a conjuncture. The leadership at this point had a duty to indicate this to the membership, which they did but failing to connect this insight to the debate on program within the group, only for some of them to fall into a mood of revolutionary impatience of a different kind the very next day.

None of this invalidates the transitional method of politics which aims to raise the consciousness and organisational homogeneity of the class by relating their current problems to the goal of socialism. What it does indicate is that tactical prescriptions cannot be automatically taken from dusty old documents and applied to situations radically differing from those of the past. Moreover it ignores the vital importance of developing an analysis of the nature of the current period and relating that to revolutionary practice by means of a developed perspective. Such a perspective having of necessity to constitute a section of any revolutionary program whatever the precise nature of that program. Which brings me back to the October revolution and Left Communism.

If Trotskyism, or as I prefer to think of it Bolshevik Leninism, was the product of the International Left Opposition it was core to that tendency’s self conception that it was the continuation of the political views held by Lenin, Trotsky, the much mythologized Bolshevik Party and the majority of the Comintern up to the Fourth World Congress. In precisely the same sense the groups such as the International Communist Current, Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) and International Communist Party (Programna Comunista) stand in the tradition of the Italian and/or German/Dutch Left Communist tendencies. Now if Yves is correct and today’s Trotskyists are no longer concerned with social revolution and most of the tactics taken from the Comintern, codified as it were in the Transitional Program, are no longer valid then we have a bit of a problem. The problem being that the Left Communist groups have proven almost totally unable to even talk to militant workers let alone recruit them to the cause of communism.

This arises because the so called Left Communist tendencies are really often little more than Social Democratic tendencies holding to the conception that because imperialist capitalism has entered into its decadent stage that there is no longer any need for minimal or democratic demands and that the proletariat must simply be exhorted, by means of abstract propaganda, to struggle for the maximal or communist program. There is a logic to this position but it ignores the conception, integral to Marxism, that it is the conscious ranks of the exploited who must free themselves from the bondage of wage labour. But other than in the fantasies of half crazed ideologues the great mass of the exploited cannot be taught by pedagogues (not even communist pedagogues!) that their goal must be the abolition of wage labour but must learn that most valuable of all lessons through their own experiences. One reason for the elaboration of a transitional politics by the Comintern was exactly this necessity of engaging the masses in the struggle rather than fall into a propagandism so abstract that the Impossibilists of the Socialist Party of Great Britain could see it as their own - were it not for their hostility clause!

Trotskyism then remains, for all its many faults, the only possible starting point for a Marxism adapted to the realities of today. By making this argument I am not denigrating the work of the Left Communist tendencies but simply acknowledging that their contributions have not been in the field of politics but rather in the field of theory. Thus the writings of Canne Meier, Pannekoek, Bordiga, Mattick and others besides continue to have value but only if used to supplement a renewed Marxism that seeks to connect theory and practice dialectical rather than simply deriving an abstract theory from a material reality which it can never be a part of. The struggles of the past generations of Left Communists too only have value if they are seen as a contribution to the emancipation of Man and not simply as the factional inheritance of sects standing foursquare in a tradition that relates to reality in the same manner as many a politically quietist millenarian cult does.

It is interesting when looking at Left Communism and Trotskyism to reflect on those groups and individuals which have existed on the fringes of both at various times or have moved between them. I’m thinking here of those groups which originated in the 1940’s when the currents being discussed were far clearer and less divided by subsequent events. The Johnson-Forrest Tendency of CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaja is perhaps the most interesting example as it began by breaking with Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian state in order to adopt a state capitalist analysis of that social formation. In many ways the group was praiseworthy in its attempts to develop worker intellectuals, they also exhibited considerable foresight in its understanding of automation (contrast their understanding of automation with that of Mike Kidron, one of the most insightful theoreticians of the IS, in his little known pamphlet of 1956 and the importance of the location of the James-Dunajevskaja group in the USA becomes very clear) and its attempts to draw attention to the early humanist writings of Marx. But like the Left Communist groups they degenerated into sects, quite intellectual sects perhaps, but nonetheless they did degenerate into similarly ossified sects.

The reason for this is only tangentially related to the elevation of Dunayevskaja and James, in their respective groups, to the status of founder-leader to be considered the authority of last resort come what may. More important by far is their shared failure to understand the need for a perspective based on objective economic and political conditions from which a set of political tactics can be developed with the aim of winning the mass of the workers to the socialist organisation. This can be seen with the switch of the original tendency from Shachtmans Workers Party to Cannons Socialist Workers Party in 1948 whereby they abandoned a group which understood that the world was not entering into the much looked for revolutionary crisis and sought to develop tactics to fit reality in favour of a group which having been quite passive during the war was now convinced that the revolutionary crisis was upon them. Sharing nothing but this utterly foolish perspective and the belief that the SWP was proletarian through and through the two tendencies were at odds as early as 1948 as can be seen in their differing attitudes to the Miners Strike of that year in which the SWP acted as little more than passive cheerleaders for the union bureaucracy, a consequence of their substitutionism on the domestic stage, while the tendency took their shared perspective seriously sought to act as revolutionaries. Although their conception of leadership meant that as in practice they saw revolutionary practice developing spontaneously they submerged themselves in the struggle itself failing to relate the revolutionary organisation to the current tasks of those sections of the class they worked with.

The irony of this evolution is that another tendency existed in American Trotskyism at that time which held not dissimilar positions on a series of questions. I’m thinking here of the so called Goldman-Morrow minority within the SWP some of whom like James and Dunayevskaja were of the opinion that the Russian social system was an exploitative society which could best be understood as state capitalist. Indeed they were very clear that for them Russia was State Capitalist writing in a 1946 Resolution that “But what is the “class base” of this bureaucratic state? The bureaucracy is a class in the process of formation, a form of the bourgeoisie whose historic transformations have been numerous from the 13th century to the present day. What is the economic root of the exploitation of the proletariat by this class? State Capitalism on the base of the planned stratified economy.” It seems however that the Johnson-Forest Tendency was not interested in finding areas of agreement with these comrades but only concerned with building their own small tendency in preparation for the pre-revolutionary situation that they, like the Cannonite SWP Majority, saw on the horizon.

With the failure of the revolutionary wave to materialise Johnson-Forrest were left high and dry and retreated into a propagandism mitigated only by the value of some of their theoretical work. As for the SWP Minority and the Shachtmanites they gave in to demoralisation and abandoned politics or moved to the right. Another tendency in the Fourth International that understood the failure of the revolutionary wave that began in Italy in 1943, we could arguably move the date back to the Quit India campaign of 1942, and adapted their tactics to a changed situation was the leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party in Britain around Jock Haston. Intriguingly they too adopted a far more consistently anti-Stalinist position than the Cannon sponsored leadership of the FI around Pablo and Mandel arguing vociferously against giving any kind of political support to the Tito regime in Yugoslavia when it broke away from the attempted colonial domination of Stalin’s Russian Empire. In my opinion this position was connected to their 1947 resolution on Statification in Britain, published in their organ Socialist Appeal as a series and never republished, from which they were already in recoil by the end of 1948. Under pressure both from the international leadership and from an unprincipled factional minority the Haston-Grant majority disintegrated with the latter retreating theoretically just as the former abandoned revolutionary politics. Despite which the investigations of the RCP majority prior to its capitulation to the international majority’s collapse into tailism was the starting point for Cliffs work on the Russian question.

The evolution of the Cliff group has been discussed above but I would like to reiterate the argument that the central reason why it was able to construct a slim base in the industrial working class was because it based its work on the tactics worked out by the Third and Fourth Internationals. That is to say they were able to function as an organisationally independent revolutionary group, but only when a layer of young workers had developed liable to be receptive to the open party tactic, because a core of militants had been developed at an earlier stage by judicious use of the entry tactic. Indeed so fierce had the open partyism of the SWP become by the 1980’s that young comrades would often express opinions that were openly anti-electoralist or to put that in an older language such comrades were anti-parliamentary! Which in light of the SWP’s turn to electoralism with the Socialist Alliance goes some way to showing how deep is the degeneration of that group in recent years.

As an aside I note that since the demise of the Socialist Alliance, dumped peremptorily by the SWP when it no longer served their leaderships opportunist purposes, the SWP has engaged in building Respect a populist coalition. A coalition built with millionaire petty bourgeois communalists and elements influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood which Cliff once described as clerico-fascist. So rightwing is this coalition that the right wing eclecticist personal group of Sean Matgamna, currently trading as the Alliance for Workers Liberty (sic), is able to maintain its posturing as a revolutionary grouping against a great mass of evidence to the contrary. The price for building an organisation based on a ‘tradition’ not on loyalty to the historic class interests of the working classes and the method of Marxism is evidently a high one and the rewards few.

But say what one will of the SWP it does retain an awareness of itself as a revolutionary Marxist organisation struggling for a communist society and it does seek to educate, if poorly and patchily, its members in what it takes for Marxism. Which extends to its usage, both internally and in its more theoretical publications, of the language Yves believes is no longer used by present day Trotskyist groups. Of course in the case of the SWP it has long been acknowledged that use of the term Dictatorship of the Proletariat for example would sound strange to British ears and other terms are often substituted. Although there is a price to be paid when such terms begin to sound alien to the younger members immersed in Respect and other party fronts. It is worth noting that the SWP and the IST are by no means the only present day Trotskyists to continue to use a terminology coined in the early 1920’s and I have in just the last few weeks noted the use of the term United Front in documents emanating from Germany and the USA.

There is also a very good reason why such terms are not in general or public use. After all with what forces would a revolutionary communist group seek to forge a United Front with in the Britain of 2007? Surely not with the Labour Party which can barely rouse its membership, consisting largely of petty bourgeois careerists and the New Middle Classes in any case, to campaign in General Elections? Perhaps then with the Communist Party of Britain that aging club of 700 odd cheerleaders for the not so left trades union bureaucrats? But in the Trades Unions there are opportunities for forming alliances based on the method of the United Front. That is to say on the method of transitional politics. In fact there are other unexpected opportunities for the formation of United Fronts should one’s eyes be focused on the class and not on one’s sect or on intermediary organisations such as the Labour Party and the Trades Unions.

But such a method of raising class struggle politics in the unions, that is to say in the only mass organisations based exclusively on sections of the working classes, cannot be the central locus of communist propaganda. As was ever the case that must be the point of production, that is to say at the location where both surplus value is extracted and where the two social classes come into direct conflict, in the workplaces whatever form they might take in these supposedly post-Fordist times. This after all was the central argument of the Comintern’s theses on organisation of 1921 a document too Russian by Lenin’s admission and how right he was given how the theses have been treated as a kind of New Testament to the Old Testament of What Is To Be Done? by the Zinovieivite epigonii. And was it not also an argument of the Transitional Program which drew, let us say it, far too heavily on the French and American experience to the exclusion of other nations. And was it not also the meaning of the elevation of the, then unofficial, Shop Stewards Committees by successive generations of revolutionaries in Britain up to and including IS in the early 1970’s to a most exalted status?

To close it is my strongly held opinion that within some of the Trotskyist groups there are elements who do wish to see the destruction of class society and the foundation of a truly human society on its ashes. I would go further and argue that some such elements can even be found in the leaderships of the groups although I hold out little hope that any of the leading figures of the larger groups would, even were the class struggle to increase in intensity tenfold, be able to break from their various ‘get rich quick schemes’ and adopt a stance of confidence in the efforts of the class itself. Nonetheless the greatest reservoir of revolutionary elements today is to be found within the various Trotskyist groups and that is no small thing. Moreover some of their militants have real experience, on a small scale of course, of leading struggles and building networks albeit the framework of such work as all too often been the official union structures. Yet even this I find is not to be sneered at when there are no other working class structures that can provide any kind of context for the coming together of militants in the workplaces. And despite their degeneration some of the Trotskyist groups do retain vestiges of an orientation to the workplaces due to their continued allegiance to the conception of the working class as a universal social revolutionary class.

Surely this workplace orientation was also an integral, one could say essential, element of the politics of the Council Communists such as Pannekoek and Canne Meier? Is it not this emphasis on workers power growing out of the struggles of the class itself that is the main strength of the Council Communist tradition? And is it not that currents complete lack of ability to relate to the class as it was and is the reason for its disappearance? It may well be the case that the trades unions have been recuperated by capital but if the workers look towards them and to some degree participate in them then do revolutionaries have any option but to work within them? A similar sectism condemns the remnant Anarcho-Syndicalist groups to irrelevance from the working class as it is today.

The sad truth is that Council Communism and the Anarcho-Syndicalism have nothing to commend them to young workers today. The only real influence they have is due to the glamour granted them by such activist-scholars as Noam Chomsky which guarantees their works a certain small readership and thereby ensures that their ideas are not totally lost to academia and history. This despite the academic base of both the boosters for Council Communism and much of its current small audience. An irony of history one need not enjoy to understand. What it means however is that the ideas of Council Communism have next to no connection with the life of the workers and that the adherents of such ideas would appear to find this acceptable. Such is the nature of sectism.

If it is true that the Council Communist tradition is dead within the ranks of the working class then the same is almost equally true of the Italian Communist Left even one suspects in its homeland. Indeed it appears to this observer that where the groups identifying with the Italian Left exist that in practice they play an identical role to that played in other countries to those Trotskyist groups marked most by reliance on the invariable words of their respective masters and with it a deeply ingrained sectism. Such groups are in future likely to be less attractive than their rival Trotskyist groups with their additional attractions. In any case it cannot be denied that many of these groups, whether they be ‘Bordigist’ or Trotskyist, grow sclerotic and increasingly unable to attract new recruits for reasons almost unconnected to their politics.

To draw these remarks to a conclusion what, other than a sectism rooted in the defeated battles and isolation from the class leading to the formation of partial factional born ‘traditions’, prevents the positive contributions of all currents being integrated into a single whole? Certainly different analyses of the Russian Revolution have some importance but can it matter in 2007ce when exactly the class rule of the bourgeoisie was restored? Except to those who worship the icon of Lenin, while ignoring the real revolutionary, and that problem is as characteristic of Bordigists as of Trotskyists.In which case it matters not a jot what Kronstadt signified as such an episode cannot and will not be repeated. It is a sad, but understandable, adherence to constructed artificial traditions that ensures that the insights of the Left Communist groups are not more widely read and studied by those groups which come from the Trotskyist or Bolshevik Leninist tradition despite the fact that all too often they have, when they have won some small influence, recapitulated the errors of the Left in different form.

In fact it is the low level of class struggle in the imperialist metropoles that is the central reason why the insights from Trotskyism and Left Communism cannot be integrated into a whole as its absence ensures that the questions which those currents came into being to answer are not now being raised other than by isolated individuals or as it is put in your exchange by dinosaurs. The generalised downturn in workers struggles after 1975 has ensured that ideas which were developed as a result of the revolutionary upsurge of 1916-1923 simply have little relevance for the functioning of a revolutionary minority. The much changed composition of the working class has done the rest, in Britain this has meant the reduction of even the most elemental level of class consciousness amongst the working classes to a level not much better and in some respects inferior to that which has long characterised the American proletariat, leading to a major reduction in the numbers of ostensible revolutionaries and a degeneration in the quality of their cadres.

The degeneration of the cadres of the revolutionary groups is not simply a matter of academic understanding of Marxism, it is easy to find within say the SWP or LCR comrades with considerable understanding of Marxism in relation to many questions, but of an inability to relate Marxism to the development of revolutionary consciousness in the current struggles of the working classes today. That is to say that the real failure of the groups is in their attempts to build a revolutionary organisation apart from the working class as it is constituted today or out of cadre drawn from other struggles which are not central to the lived experience of the class itself. ‘Leninist’ though it might be, although I would argue that it has nothing in common with the politics of Lenin, this vain attempt to privilege the revolutionary organisation (which following Trotsky I call Zinovieivism) over the development of class consciousness as the key task for revolutionary communists is doomed to utter and ignominious failure when the revolutionary organisation lacks roots and an orientation to the very class it posits as the uniquely revolutionary force within society.

The problem then seems to me is how do dinosaurs bring the lessons of past revolutionary movements to the attention of those members of the Trotskyist groups who might be willing to learn from them? Or to put it another way how do dinosaurs indicate to the members of the groups that it is the proletariat, not the union structures, that should be the central concern of revolutionaries? Not by condemning them in the fashion of either the ICC as the ‘left wing of the bourgeoisie’ or the Spartacist League as ‘Pabloite revisionists’ or some such nonsense but by seeking to engage them in debate and if possible in common actions. How exactly that task can be accomplished I know not, for the opportunities for common work or even debate are limited given that the sectism of all the groups is highly developed and the prestige of their leaders cherished above all else, but it must be attempted.

For Communism

Mike Pearn

2007-07-31T19:02:00.000-07:00

Wadical Wadishes

News reaches me that Housmans, the so called radical booksellers, have pushed loyal and hardworking employees out the door. Moreover they have squandered monies donated by sympathisers in paying an anti-union company Peninsula for advice as to how to sack said loyal employees. Proof, as if it were needed, that peaceniks are collaborators in the oppression of the toiling masses!!!! Stay tuned for more details when I can be bothered.

In the meantime buy your books at Bookmarks (wear a hijab to please the SWP) rather than at scabby Housmans.

2007-06-22T01:29:00.000-07:00

This blog is temporarily suspended.

2007-05-24T14:59:00.000-07:00

Tron Ogrim

Tron Ogrim has died but his life was not in vain as he spent it well fighting for a better future for humanity. That most precious quality was regularly on show in his contributions to the Spotters list an oftimes silly but peculiarly serious discussion list for the followers of the doings of the multitude of warring groups which situate themselves on the left worldwide. It matters not a jot that Tron had politics that had little in common with my own. What mattered when reading Tron was that sense of humanity and humour he conveyed that is only possessed by those who have fought and alas lost battles with the enemies of humanity. Tron fought those battles and it would seem he played a role in leading our side in his homeland. But now he fights no more and it is left to others to continue that fight. We shall win!

2007-05-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

Reasons to Admire The People of the United States of America

Krazy Kat

(1913-1944)

The American people have much to be proud of - not least George Herriman the creator of Krazy kat, the single most extraordinary strip cartoon character ever inked. Making every other cartoon cat look insipid, Krazy lived in a world that was as confused and confusing as that of any European surrealists over-intellectualised phantasy. Krazy was and remains both more complex and simpler than the elitist art of galleries and museums. He was and remains popular in a fashion that the self-conscious art vanguard which flourished in his life never were nor could be. More important he was funnier by far.

Krazy Kat was a great artistic statement in that most popular of media; print. The later animations which bear his name are shallow even by comparison with Hanna-Barbera toons. Despite not immediately finding his audience, he was protected by that great patron of the arts and all round bandit, William Randolph Hearst, so proving that even a capitalist got soul.

My own discovery of Krazy came by accident through a friend and it was only later that i came to know of the secondary literature concerning Krazy that went ito detail as to how subversive of gender roles and suchlike the toons were. Bullshit in my view it really doesn't matter whether or not Krazy was 'gay' he's a cartoon! The only thing genuinely subversive about Krazy was that the strips were and are very funny. The authoritarian personalities that yearn to dominate and rule over others simply cannot abide that.

2007-05-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

McNonentity versus Moocher

Who Gives A Shit?

A glance at various right wing blogs such as davespart and socialistunity (sic) reveals the authors of said blogs in a state of near hysteria. What is the question of such vital importance for the many million workers of Britain? Nothing less than the question as to whether John McDonnell MP or Michael Meacher MP have support from a handful of their fellow MP's. A vital question for the development of the social revolution as it will decide which of these nonentities shall go forward to be soundly defeated by Gordon Brown MP.

That Brown has the leadership in the bag our right wing friends know full well. For them the point is to have a 'debate' in the ranks of the Labour Movement' about the 'way forward' in order to begin the renewal of the Labour Left (RIP). Neprimerimye blog wishes them the best of luck in this enterprise but wishes to point out that the 'Labour Movement' is now a much reduced force largely consisting of elderly male white dullards and equally dull liberal apparatchiks in the white coller unions.

Our right wing friends are, in the opinion of this blogger, engaged in a form of politics that is utterly futile functioning as a hobby not as a serious attempt to raise the class consciousness of a working class which cannot be recognised in their posts as it is seemingly of no real concern to them. But like it or not it is amongst the working classes, which is oblivious to the petty politicking of McNonentity versus Moocher, not the comatose 'Labour Movement' to which socialists ought to be looking for a response to the Brown administration.

2007-05-03T21:01:00.000-07:00

Plaid Candidate ex-Trot Shock!

Glancing through the incredibly uninteresting returns for the Welsh Assembly elections one name caught my eye. The name in question being that of Danny Bowles Plaid Cymru candidate in Swansea West. Danny is that unusual creature a Welsh nationalist from Engerland.

More importantly Danny has passed through a fair number of left groups prior to finding a home in Plaid Cymru. When I first met him he was a member of Workers Power and later progressed to being a member or at least organised sympathiser with Red Action. A little while later he was defintely in the Socialist Labour Party during which time he entered into a reasonably close relationship with the cpgb and certainly claimed that he was a member at one point.

The above are the groups I know for certain that he has been associated with but at different times he made claims to myself and others that he had been in the Socialist Party prior to the Poll Tax riot after which he quit 'cos they grassed people up' as well as the Socialist Workers Party.

Danny oscillated between a largely verbal leftism, dominated by his visceral and quite correct hatred for fascism, and a desire to work within the 'democratic' system. So enamoured with acting as respectably as possible he once argued in the SLP that all canvassers should wear suits or stay at home. naturally he did nt last long enough in that party to actually participate in an election but I know his thoughts were with us later.

The Danny Bowles I remember was a nice slightly confused young man wih a good heart. Obviously the confusion remains I hope his essential decency has too.

2007-05-02T18:37:00.000-07:00

Falling Standards of Educayshun

It is often remarked that in recent years educational standards have fallen in this country. In the view of neprimerimye blog this viewpoint has some validity. But in many regards educational standards have always been low amongst the working classes. I mean have you read this blog?

2007-05-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

International Electoral Advice

Complaints have reached us here at neprimerimye blog, or so my staff tell me, that out readership, now thought to number in the double figures, are concerned that I have not helped those of them who live in England and Scotland decide how to vote. Clearly this is a failure on my part so what follows is a brief set of guidelines as to how one should vote in the mock elections tomorrow.

First of all lets be frank and admit that these elections don’t really matter very much. For the most part because local councils have very few discretionary powers and are subject in every area of policy to central government as well as a powerful bureaucracy which is not subject to the ruling party on any given council. As for the Edinburgh parliament it has some powers it is true but is essentially as far removed from the active participation and control of working people as the Assembly of the United Nations. The only real purpose in socialists standing then can be to make propaganda as no substantial reforms are possible from such toothless bodies.

With the above in mind then and mindful of the need at all times to develop proletarian independence from all the parties of the boss class this blog has to say, very reluctantly, that in 99% of cases a Labour vote is the only possibility. There will be a very small number of exceptions which we discuss below.

First of all in Scotland it is principled to vote for candidates of both Solidarity and the Scottish Socialist Party. Both are miserable sects with no future before them embroiled in a nasty personalist feud based on their shared elevation of that doyen of cheap demagogy Tommy Sheridan with almost identical politics. As to their rotten politics little need be said but their shared support for Scottish nationalism and opposition to proletarian internationalism stinks. As does the adulation of tyrants such as the Caribbean tyrant Castro common in both sects. But do vote for them if you can stomach their politics.

In the council elections in England fewer alternatives to Labour are on offer. Some candidates are standing in the name of Respect the populist coalition but nobody with an iota of self respect will vote for that rotten alliance. One can but hope it falls apart soon if only for the sake of the poor members of the Socialist Workers Party who must loathe seeing their efforts treated with such clear contempt by both their own leaders and their communalist allies both. So save the SWP don’t vote Respect!

More realistically the Socialist Party, led by Peter Taaffe the former office manager for the late Ted Grant, are standing a few candidates. All are well worth supporting as they are usually good solid reliable comrades. Although what they hope to achieve is beyond my ken given that they do not raise openly evolutionary politics in their campaigns and rely instead on presenting themselves as some kind of continuation of the old Labour Party they yearn to recreate. I suppose it keeps the operation functioning even if it contributes exactly nothing to the development of a revolutionary leadership.

To close if you happen to be French vote against Sarkosy. That is vote for that horrid woman standing for the Socialist Party.

2007-05-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

Electoral Advice for the Welsh Assembly

Elections in 2007 are stupendously boring of no real interest but to halfwits and television presenters with nothing better to do. Serious decisions about how ee live are not made in bodies such as the Welsh Assembly. This is meant to be a political blog however and electoral contests are meant to be of central importance in a democratic society such as ours so I suppose I had better advise the readership of neprimerimye blog how to vote. Don't worry I won't make it a habit.

Well in nutshell what you do is look at the parties standing candidates and reject in the first place all those who are total fucking arseholes. That disposes of UKIP, the Tories, Liberals, religious lunatics,anti abortion crazies and other assorted jackasses. Next reject any nationalists as their real aim is to return Wales to the pre-Roman past as represented by our map to the left.

Next check out the various 'left' alternatives and ask if they actually have any grasp of reality and/or living members in Wales. This time round this means the post-Breznevite nostalgic Stalinoids of the misnamed Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Labour Party led by the utterly deluded Arthur Scargill (not the Arthur of whom it was foretold he would save Wales I fear) and the Socialist Equality Party which is the ceature of a corrupt print industry millionnaire. Also in the field we have Respect and a bunch of independents running on politics which aren't even a poor parody of socialism. Next we have the small Socialist Party who are at least principled socialists if very dull.

Sadly we have a rubbish version of proportional representation in Wales meaning that a vote for the Socialist Party on the regional list would mean the possibility of allowing a nationalist or another openly anti-working class candidate through. At very least in Wales we need an increase in the number of seats in the Assembly and a better method of voting. That is until we can institute a workers democracy based on councils elected from the workplaces and residential districts. Sadly none of the parties in these elections are calling for this policy better known as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Which leaves us with the Labour Party and lets be clear about this remains the only party in this contest which has any organic connection to the workers movement. Whidch means that if its not raining and theres nothing better to do you really should get over to the polling station in order to vote for them. Not a nice option I admit but given the alternaives it is currently the only option for decent people.

2007-05-01T05:21:00.000-07:00

Manifesto to the Working Class

(1903)

Fellow-Workers,

The most significant feature of the political development of this last ten years is the growing dis-satisfaction of the working-class with the existing political parties. The defection of the workers from the capitalist parties has for long been the theme of orthodox politicians. Very few of their speeches at the present time fail to conclude with a querulous expostulation with the workers for their desertion of those whom they had previously trusted, or a tearful entreaty to return to the fold. The causes of this phenomenon are pretty well known. The ruthless attacks made upon the workers striving by means of strike or boycott to obtain slightly better conditions of life, as evidenced by the actions of capitalist Home Secretaries at Featherstone, Broxburn, Motherwell, Hull and Grimsby; the suppression of Trade Union organisation by the legal decision in connection with the Taff Vale Railway dispute, and the case of Quinn versus Leatham - these and other occurrences for which all parties at present represented in the British House of Commons are equally responsible have induced in the workers the belief that their interests as a class are menaced by their present legislators, and that the welfare of their masters alone meets with consideration. The need for a party representing the working class and defending its interests is generally felt and expressed. Class feeling in short is becoming increasingly manifest. But what is not clearly recognised is the necessity for such a party having a clear, definite and practical basis, and an intelligent conception of its position, method and goal. There is considerable danger that honest aspirations of the workers and their sincere endeavours to better their lot by political activity may be frustrated and led into a blind alley by the efforts of crafty and unscrupulous politicians and self-styled Labour Leaders. Therefore in calling upon you to give us your support in forming the party of the workers we lay before you our methods and aim, together with the attitude with which we intend to adopt towards the existing political parties, ”Labour” or otherwise.

The SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY differs from all parties at present in existence in that it appeals to the working class and the working class alone for support. Whether it be in the city or the nation, in Town Council or in Parliament, it is the one section of the population that has any right to consideration. They alone produce the wealth of society, and it is our aim that they alone should possess it. Our attack upon the present constitution of society is both its political and economic aspects is due to the fact that the class that dominates the state, to whose interest and advantages all our social institutions are directed, is the useless, obsolete and parasitical capitalist class. The power to rob and exploit, which is vested in this class, rests upon their political supremacy. It is thus they are enabled to bring all the powers of the state, police and military, to bear upon those workers who strive to decrease their aster’s spoils by increasing their miserable wages. It follows then that all efforts of the workers to better their conditions must be centred in the task of overthrowing the supremacy of the master class in the state, and of using the power so gained to seize the means of life to be used by the workers and their dependents, in short, to obliterate the capitalist class as a social and political entity.

By this we do not mean what is variously called “State Socialism”, “Public Ownership”, or “Municipalism” - that is the ownership of certain public utilities by a community in which capitalism is still dominant. A worker is as much exploited by a capitalist state or corporation as by a private capitalist employer - as post-office or municipal employees an testify. We insist upon the political overthrow of capitalism as an absolutely necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the working class, and the establishing of the Socialist Republic. Otherwise an industry controlled by a capitalist state differs only from one controlled by an individual capitalist in the superior powers of the former to rob and oppress those under its thraldom.

This is precisely the point that has been hitherto ignored by organisations appealing to the working class. At the present time there are certain bodies of this nature named respectively, the Independent Labour Party, the Labour Representation Committee, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society - parties differing only in name and in phraseology, but almost identical in principles and tactics. All these organisations are dominated either by middle-class men or working men influenced by middle-class habits and thoughts.

As contrasted with all such compromisers and confusionists who would lead the working class to destruction, we desire to lay before you the principles of polical action on which our party will proceed. We intend wherever possible to contest on behalf of the working class, and against all other political parties, very election, municipal or national. We do not cater for the support of those workers who do not recognise our goal, nor agree with us as to the means whereby it is to be attained. These means, we repeat, are the conquest of political power by the working class and in the interests of the working class, manifesting itself through an avowedly Socialist organisation.

This explains alike our policy and our name, Socialist Labour Party. Socialist, because through socialism alone can the workers be emancipated; Labour, because by the labouring classes alone can Socialism be attained; Party, because we are not merely an educational or propagandist body, but stand for the political expression of our class interests for the formation of the Socialist Republic.

SOCIALISM IS THE ONLY HOPE FOR THE WORKERS. ALL ELSE IS ILLUSION.

2007-04-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

The Iran Crisis Today as Yesterday?

The following should be read together with an earlier post, republished from the Socialist Review of August 1951, The Persian Crisis.

*** *** ***

After 1945 a declining British imperialism came under pressure from the government of what was then Persia, but has since adopted the historic name of Iran, to pay higher royalties on oil extracted from that country’s vast reserves. This came as something of a surprise to the British government which had long been used to collaborating with the Persian ruling class in a mutually profitable arrangement. Surprise turning to shock and anger when the Persian government decided to take into state ownership the entire oil industry. What was most surprising about the affair was that the Persian government itself appeared to be reaching out to the impoverished masses of workers and peasants for support. It is this that the author of the article describes as the “strange policy of Mossadiq” and the semi-feudal Persian ruling class.

Strange indeed for a bourgeois politician in the colonial world of those days but a phenomena which would become more and more familiar in the second half of the twentieth century. What confused the situation was that the Persian ruling class was nominally independent, but historically subservient, to British imperialism. Yet had our author glanced at Latin America he might have noticed very similar tactics in operation. For example in Argentina, like Persia, a client of British imperialism, a section of the ruling class had raised Peron to power while manoeuvring between the declining British and rising American imperialists and all on the basis of support from the subaltern classes. Similarly Mossadegh was able to manoeuvre between the relatively weak British and Russian imperialisms by leaning on the support of the workers and peasants.

Clear on the imperialist nature of Stalinist Russia the article correctly pointed out that by opposing both British and Russian imperialisms the Persian government had not only won the support of the masses but had, at least temporarily, undermined the Persian Stalinists of the Tudeh (Labour) Party. It was however a balancing act that could not be sustained once American imperialism became embroiled and backed its declining ally in the hope of grabbing a larger share of Persian oil for itself. We shall return to this point below.

For the now Mossadegh was able to triumph and coerced payments of a larger share of oil revenues from the AIOC, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company later renamed British Petroleum, the principal company involved in exploiting the Persian oil reserves. Having done so he became emboldened and moved to complete statification of the oil industry in April 1951. The question raised for socialists in Britain by the crisis this provoked was how to respond to this unexpected event. Here the article is confusing unless something is known of the Socialist Review Group (SRG) in whose magazine it appeared as an unsigned editorial.

In brief, the SRG was the organisational forerunner of the International Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of today. But in 1951 it was a tiny fragment of the Trotskyist movement, numbering fewer than 30 members, active in a Labour Party which politically hegemonised a workers movement far larger than is the case today. A Labour Party moreover which was in government, generally popular amongst workers, and able to point to substantial reforms in the form of the statification of entire sectors of the economy and a major expansion of welfare state provision. This explains the pedagogical form adopted in the article when it talks of what a “British Socialist Government” might do in relation to the crisis. Readers would have been well aware that the article was not thereby referring to the Labour government which is described as carrying out “blatantly anti-socialist” measures.

Another interesting aspect of the article is that while it generally outlines an anti-imperialist position of solidarity with the statification of the oil industry by the Persian state, that is the semi-feudal and therefore historically reactionary Persian state as described by our author, it does not dub this action as anti-imperialist. Instead it raises the possibility of the Persian workers and peasants, in the first instance the oil workers, seizing control of the oil industry and of the state itself. It is then the Persian working class who are seen as the genuine anti-imperialists and allies of a Socialist Britain and of the workers movement in this country. For them a perspective of permanent revolution is posited, although not explicitly as this was after all an entrist magazine, as the only real anti-imperialist position.

These positions are very different indeed to those adopted today by the SWP. That organisation rather than fighting for solidarity with the Iranian workers movement makes clear its support for the Iranian ruling class, correctly seen as Bismarkian in its attempts to develop capitalism in that country, which is portrayed as an anti-imperialist force in the region. Which is only true if we reduce the concept of imperialism to its non-Marxist meaning of empire. But this is not the essence of the term as used by Marxists since both Lenin and Luxemburg developed their theories of imperialism which, despite their differences, both located imperialism as a stage in the development of capitalism. It follows that for Marxists an authentic anti-imperialism is not to be found in those forces which oppose the evil empire of the USA, or yesterday of Britain, but in the form of the revolutionary workers movement.

If then the SWP of today has moved away from a Marxist understanding of imperialism and the necessity of a social revolution in Iran, in its politics if not in the pages of its theoretical journal, it is ironic that the possibility of such a revolution is far greater now than it was in 1951. For since 1951 the Iranian bourgeoisie has developed the productive forces many times over with the result that it has now produced its antithesis in the shape of a many mullioned urban proletariat with a proven capacity for struggle for was it not this class that overthrew the Shah in 1979? Moreover there is a vacuum of leadership amongst the working masses in Iran as a result of the collapse of Stalinism and the repression of the theocratic regime. A vacuum on the left, to steal a phrase from another time, which the SWP refuses to address itself to preferring to denigrate the small confused groups of the Iranian left as sectarians rather than engage them in discussion.

The Persian crisis of 1951 was but the prelude to the CIA managed coup which overthrew the Mossadegh regime the first and last democratic government that Iran has known. That coup marked the replacement of Britain by the USA as the major imperialist power in the region a position which it has held to this day despite being challenged by smaller powers such as Iraq and Iran which have sought to bolster their relative positions at the expense of their neighbours in the region by any means that came to hand including main force. But unlike the situation in 1951 Iran today cannot manoeuvre between rival imperialist powers but is largely isolated receiving only some marginal support from such smaller imperialist states as China. Although the military and political weakness of the USA and its allies, including Britain, suggest that unless a collapse of the economy takes place its rulers can maintain stability in the face of and largely because of American hostility.

In 1951 the SRG, despite being minuscule, was clear that only a social revolution could save humanity from what was seen as an oncoming Third World War and they were confident that as a result of their opposition to all forms of capitalism they could find their way to the leadership of the working class to achieve that aim. In the event the war to not take place and they did not succeed in winning the leadership of the workers movement. But they did lay the foundations for the later achievements of the International Socialists as a small but vital part of the massive workers struggles of the early 1970’s and of the SWP as the leading force in the defeat of the Nazional Front later that decade.

In 2007 the far larger SWP by its opportunist policy lays the foundations for later defeats and setbacks in Iran and Britain. Rather than adopt a policy of military support for a minor capitalist state threatened, as is Iran by the USA and Britain, it uncritically lauds the theocratic regime in that country as anti-imperialist when in fact it is a prison house of nations itself. Rather than provide a balanced account of the Iranian regime oppressive social policies which systematically discriminate against women it hails that regime for introducing women into the workforce as if they did so out of the goodness of their hearts and not because of labour shortages because of the cruel war waged with Iraq! Rather than indicate the road to power for the Iranian masses lies through the overthrow of the bourgeois state in Iran they opportunistically support that regime against the British ruling class. A shame that the Iranian working class cannot afford to do likewise.

In Britain too the SWP lays the foundations of its continued decline into a sect outside the ranks of the working classes. But that groups turn to a flaccid electoralism based on a populist alliance with an erratic demagogue and marginal layers of petty bourgeois communalists is best told another time. Suffice for now to say that by adopting such a campist politics which conflates the unique revolutionary potential of the international proletariat with the undifferentiated and vague category of the anti-globalise movement, that multi-headed hydra known to mythology but not reality, it negates its own history and I so doing any possible future as an element in the revolutionary ferment of tomorrow.

*** *** ***

The above was due to be posted last week but was delayed awaiting for grammer and punctuation errors by neprimerimye blogs specialist staff. Which has not been done due to sickness. At a later date the version posted above may be replaced with a second version appropriately checked.

2007-04-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

For Socialist Disunity

(Part 35a)

News reaches me that in Australia the local franchise of the International Socialist Tendency, the ISO, has resigned from the dead in the water Socialist Alliance. It would be tiresome to detail the hypocrisy of their complaint that the Democratic Socialist Perspective group in acting so as to "impose a series of disastrous decisions that debilitated and demoralised many members and affiliates" given that the Socialist Workers' Party acted in exactly that fashion in the unlamented Socialist Alliance in England.

The continued confusion with regard to perspectives which greatly over estimates the possibilities for building an alternative to neo-liberalism remains embedded in the ideas of the ISO. Indeed they have no choice on this matter unless they wish to reject, as would be advisable, the tutelage of the SWP. And so we have empty headed talk Linkspartei and WASG in Germany being born out of "mass protests against government attempts to dismantle the welfare state". In fact the formation of both groups is more complex and in the case of the formerly Stalinist Linkspartei far less positive than the ISO would have us believe. As for the idea that Respect in Britain was born out of a "successful anti-war movement" have I missed news of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq?

More interesting by far is the denunciation of the DSP, by the ISO, for acting in a sectarian manner with regard to the Australian Labor Party. They write that it is wrong to 'treat the ALP as if it were simply "Another Liberal Party"' as this will establish insurmountable barriers to attracting past and present Labor Party members! All very well and good and the comrades, it is to be hoped, will in future make use of the United Front tactic in working with such Labor supporters in common struggles against the bosses and neo-liberalism. But I wonder what might happen were the ISO leadership to think this question through.

It is, as far as I know, commonly accepted amongst Marxists that the Labour Parties of the world based as they are on the electoral support of working people and politically on their links with the trade union bureaucracy form a particular type of reformist Workers' Parties. Albeit in this period they are reformists without any serious interest in reforms which might benefit the working classes. Reformists withiout reforms then to coin a old phrase. Such Workers' Parties are of course sometimes described as Bourgeois Workers' Parties as they are based on the working class but defend capitalist political positions and policies.

All of which is, or rather was in the not so distant past, accepted by all revolutionaries coming from the Troyskyist tradition. But in recent years has been rejected by a number of goups as the reformist parties have moved dramatically to the right and their base in the working classes has eroded. Which position, one I regard as incorrect, has the merit of clarity if openly advocated and based on an analysis of any given BWP. But that has not been the practice of the member groups of the IST who have rather tended to argue that the BWP's are simply liberal parties to be rejected and opposed. That is the political basis for their participation in Respect, the Linkspartei and so forth. But it is a position never made clearly and unambigously allowing the leadership of the IST/SWP to blur the question as to the class nature not only of the BWP's they reject but also to blur the class nature of the new parties they seek to build.

As we have seen in Australia where the ISO has split and split again, only in part on this question to be fair, this confusion as to the nature of BWP's and the projected political alternatives that can be built to the left of such parties is a theiretical and political disaster for revolutionists. So too in Britain where the first alternative the SWP sought to build to the left of Labour, the Socialist Alliance, clearly failed to win disillusioned Labourites as they hoped it would do and collapsed in rancour, only to be followed by the formation of Respect. Yet both these very different political formations are theorised as examples of what Callinicos calls the United Front sui generis.A United front of a soecial kind indeed that does not attract workers to its banner, iis not based on a limited agreement based on common action but instead is a semi-permanent formation oriented on electoralism and appealing to backward petty bourgeois sectoralists!

In plain terms Respect is not a United Front of any kind but a populist party. But logically if the Labour Party is no longer a BWP then the SWP ought to advocate a new Mass Workers' Party if they are themselves unable to fill the vacuum left by the move to the right of the Labour Party. That they do not do so in either Britain or Australia is simply proof of the utter inability of the leadership of the IST to distinguish between a BWP, however decayed, such as the Labour Party and populism, the belated recognition of the ISO of the Auistralian labor Party as a BWP is then of some small import. This confusion on the part of the IST is then a recipe for future setbacks and that is to be regretted given the importance of that small tendency to the dimished revolutionary left of 2007.

2007-04-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Hippies Are Killing Music

Over at Peppermint Iguana my friend Clint, I use the term loosely for he is a hippy and therefore beneath contempt, has a list of this years Summer festivals. Festivals are held sacred by hippies as they allow them to engage in their favorite pastimes of listening to cacophonous rubbish, smoking 'erb and not washing while avoiding decent society.

Left to their own devices hippies would allow civilisation to collapse and would run round naked but for a liberal daubing of woad. In fact one easy way to spot a hippy is to look for their tribal markings and distinctive clothing or lack of same! Tie dye T shirts and jewelry suspended from parts of the body which are not meant to be pierced are a good indication of a hippy in my past experience.

But the factor which always gives hippies away lies in their persistant lack of understanding as to what is or is not good music. How else can we explain the popularity of such dreadful apparitions as Ozric Tentacles and others whose names I neither know nor care to know. What need have I for their names when their smell alone gives their presence away?

But getting back to the point it is interesting - at least a little bit interesting - that punk which originated as a reaction to the drabness of the mid-1970's music scene has metamorphed into a pallid 'youth style' and/or a drab little tribal scene of shouty sloganeers who base their half baked ideas on what can only be classified as regurgitated hippy drivel.

And so the hippy punks join with the new age hippies and the weekend hippies for the festival season once again. And once again I cast my eyes over the line ups for the festivals in the vain hope that one at least might provide me with some musical stimulation and/or enjoyment. But, alas, the same judgement as in previous years must be returned and I must point out that the festivals are rubbish designed to bilk decent people of their money and/or commonsense.

Note well that a sub-species of the hippy species is very much interested in obtaining the hard earned cash of their fellow hippies. Certainly the peace and love ideology, pass the sick bucket please, is common to all hippies of all generations. But some hippies are more equal than others and not above taking advantage of their more gullible brethren. How else do you think Branston, himself only a semi-hippy but the point is valid nonetheless, obtained his many millions but by bilking poor hippies and selling them crapola like Tubular Bells? The same may be said of Malcom McLaran, a lesser more ideological hippy, but still a filthy hippy.

I challenge anyone with an understanding of the nature of music to find more than one potential valid musical experience at any of the festivals which Clint lists with such care and concrn for the great unwashed of hippiedom. It simply cannot be done for where there are once interesting artists appearing on the bills it is always the case that they have grown senile or are sucking on Satans corporate dick and looking for the largest possible audience regardless of how the music suffers as a result.

But here I must end for I'm growing bored of this rant. But let me remind you, my brave handful of readers, that the only good festival ever was Altamont for it temporarily halted the advance of the 'love generation'. Lets be clear here the B54's should have bombed Woodstock not Vietnam.

2007-03-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

Hippies Must Die!

I hate and despise those bloggers who insist on telling their paltry readerships all about their oh so fucking interesting lives and their opinions on everything from this years lipstick - nude is the thing or so I am told - to world revolution taking in the latest imported TV shows from the USA along the way. Well this blogger lives a dull life not worthy of report and has some small respect for his minuscule readership so as to credit it with enough intelligence not to want to know what my favourite TV show happens to be.

What this blog is about is revolutionary socialist politics, the uncovering of obscure texts from the revolutionary socialist tradition, the state of class struggle today and, when I eventually get around to it, loud music that makes your ears bleed. Not that I actually write much about current politics to be truthful but this is a lazy blog I'm afraid. This blogger being a disciple of Lafargue you understand.

So the general line for this blog is no personal crapola. Except this once. And I make this exception out of sheer naked hared for that sub-species of hippy vermin known as social workers. Now let's be clear, I do not mean those decent people who help your Granny when she comes out of hospital with her shopping and mobility problems, nor do I mean the kind of folks who toil for rubbish pay helping those with severe disabilities. The curs I'm talking about are the fuck-witted twats who assume they know better than you how to run your life. The kind of dorks who swallow and regurgitate whole moronic theories spewed forth by tenth rate polytechnic lecturers who have never had experience in the field. Basically I'm talking about human detritus.

One of the defining characteristics of this species of woolly-minded uber-liberal tosspots, as good liberals always they are in fact little better than cops, is a dislike of science. They are afraid of science as they recognise, in their dim fashion, that science is the production of human culture and they are afraid of Man as they cannot envisage a future in which man lives in harmony in nature having first conquered it. For them that which is good and natural can only be that which Man has not touched, and that which is bad and artificial is the realm of Man. Rather than seeing Man within nature they abstract Man and by doing so alienate their own essence from nature. Theirs is a world view fit only for fearful cynics cowering in their low grade universities while reading that veritable bible of mediocrity The Guardian.

A while back one of these dim-bulbs denounced the idea of cochlear implants for children on the grounds that such an operation, an example of man 'conquering' nature, would be an act of Audism. That is by giving a child the ability to hear, as is normal with our species, an act of discrimination against those who cannot hear would be perpetrated. You see according to this twisted logic it would be better to bring a child up deaf. The argument being that the 'deaf community', that is an abstract group to which a child may or may not have a relationship, must not be diminished by potential members gaining the ability to hear.

To me it is very strange that those who advocate this disgusting bilge do not take a sharp pointed knife and pierce their eardrums if hearing is so repugnant to them. And if we are to follow their logic then we must conclude that wearing spectacles to correct sight problems is an act of discrimination against the cross eyed, short sighted and long sighted communities. Clearly to liberate wimminkind, make no mistake without a single exception all these hippy types are feminists, it is not the state but spectacles that must be smashed!

Fuck that shit! Anyways, I'm pleased to report that one little girl I happen to know, has just had a successful cochlear implant, thanks to the tremendous development of technique which we owe to that most revolutionary of social systems capitalism She is reported to be feeling just fine and dandy if a bit baffled as to why a chunk of her hair has been shaved off. So to celebrate this I thought the readers of this blog might appreciate a picture of the child in question together with this blogger.

2007-03-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

The Persian Crisis

The crux of the Persian crisis is the struggle over the division of the profit of its oil industry. Up to now, the overwhelming majority of these profits have gone, in one form or another, into British hands, as can be seen from the following figures:

Received by British Govt. in taxation * Royalties to Persian Govt. * Gross Profits
£Mn. * £Mn * £Mn
1947 15 * 7 * 34
1948 28 * 9 * 53
1949 23 * 13.5 * 41

That the financial arrangements were too much against the interests of Persia is clear from the fact that after the outbreak of the crisis, even the representatives of the AIOC did not dare to pretend that the royalties paid to the Persian Government were anywhere near sufficient. Accordingly they proposed temporarily to fix the sum of royalties, which had been £7 million in 1947, £9 million in 1948 and £13.5 million in 1949, at an interim payment of £10 million, plus £3 million monthly, ie, a total of £46 million a year.

The Persian government was not satisfied with these concessions and insisted on nationalisation of the oil industry, and so the strange situation has come about that a Persian Government of large absentee landlords is fighting for the nationalisation of industry, while a British government which claims to be Socialist is opposing this measure tooth and nail.

To add another paradox, the Persian ruling class, which for generations had been an absolutely loyal agent of British imperialism, which was a “quisling”, totally indifferent and even opposed to any national movement, is now raising high the banner of national independence. Besides this, they even come out with a so-called “socialism”: the fight against the poverty of the Persian masses has become the battle cry of Mossadiq and Co., for which the foreign imperialist company, AIOC, serves as the butt.

The Persian Government put the blame for all the social ills, for the terrible poverty of the mass of the people, on the British exploitation of the oil wealth of the country. And to drive the point home, when Mr. Jackson, the head of the AIOC delegates to Teheran, went to see Dr. Mossadiq, the Persian Premier insisted that he go and see the notorious slums of Teheran, which are “all the fault of the Oil Company”.

While British imperialism had found allies in the feudal landowners of Persia for its social policy of keeping the country backward and thus the wages paid low, now the same landowners try to put the blame for the backwardness and poverty solely on British imperialism.

This strange policy of Mossadiq and Co. reflects the deep social and national contradictions in which the country finds itself. Mossadiq tries to raise himself above the two contending basic forces, British imperialism on the one hand, and the exploited anti-imperialist masses on the other, with the threat of the British navy which keeps the masses “in their place”, and with the help of the masses which compels imperialism to retreat and leave the oil industry - the only important industry in the country - to the landowners’ government.

To add to the complications of this situation there is the intervention of Russia and of its agency, the Stalinist (Tudeh) Party.

For 150 years Persia was a field in which two Powers fought for influence: Britain and Russia. During the last forty years, since the beginning of the extraction of oil, the struggle for control over Persia has sharpened considerably. Since the Second World War the issues have become ven more vital, as Persia and the countries round it have come to be of paramount importance in the world production of oil, the life-blood of both peace and war industries and of transport. In 1950 Persia produced 32.3 million metric tons of oil, Saudi Arabia, 26.9; Kuwait, 17.3; Iraq, 6.5. Together they produced 82 million tons. As against this the target of the oil industry of USSR as a whole for 1950 was only 35.4 million tons. What is more natural than that the Stalinist bureaucracy should be attracted to the rich Middle Eastern oilfields, including Persia? That nevertheless the Tudeh Party is not reaping the fruits, is due first of all to the fact that Russia has exposed her imperialist greed for Persian oil and has thus taken the wind out of the sails of the “anti-imperialist” propaganda of the Tudeh Party. It was only five years ago that Russia demanded an oil concession in northern Persia similar to the present British one in the South. The people’s outcry against any oil concessions to a foreign country - whether Britain or Russia - was so great that when the Persian Government refused to grant the concession to Russia, the Tudeh Party not only was not able to raise opposition to the Government, but lost nearly all the mass influence it had formerly had.

The position of US imperialism in the Persian crisis is full of contradictions. On the one hand it is in competition with the British oil interests, hence its successful effort in monopolising the oil of Saudi Arabia, its success in getting control over 50 per cent of the Kuwait oil and 25 per cent of that of Iraq. Persian oil, closed to American companies, was always a tempting object. And it must be a great temptation for American companies to send their tankers to carry away the Persian oil and thus get a foothold in this field. On the other hand, their experience of the nationalisation of the oil industry is Mexico must make it clear to the American capitalists that the nationalisation of the oil industry of Persia could be the first step towards the eviction of al the foreign imperialist oil companies in the Middle East. Hence the “solidarity” of USA with Britain in the Persian crisis. This “solidarity” is enhanced by the needs of the American struggle against Russia over the division of the world.

The present policy of the British Government in Persia is blatantly anti-socialist. To oppose nationalisation of the oil industry, to insist on the “right” of Britain to draw profits from Persia by exploiting the Persian workers, is a capitalist-imperialist policy which can have one of the following results: (1) A continuation of the exploitation of the oil works of Iran by British capitalism, with a greater or lesser part of the profits going to the ruling class and Government of Persia which collaborates with British imperialism. (2) The Persian landlords and capitalists with their Government can make use of the hatred of the Persian workers for their imperialist exploiters in order to transfer the oil industry from the hands of imperialism to the hands of the Persian Government; thus changing the exploiters, but not the fate of the exploited. (3) Russia can use this hatred of British imperialism to gain mass influence in Persia and turn the country into another Russian gubernia, thus changing one exploiting imperialism for another. (4) The Persian workers can expropriate the British owners and establish workers’ control over the oil industry and workers power in Iran as a whole. The duty of British socialists is to help the Persian workers to achieve the last result.

A British Socialist Government should take the following steps in the Persian crisis : Renounce the property rights of Britain in Persia. Call on the Persian workers to take hold of the former AIOC. With the voluntary renunciation of ownership rights in Persia, such an appeal would have a tremendous echo among the Persian workers, making it practically impossible for Mossadiq and Co. to take hold of the oil industry. With the only significant industry of Persia under workers’ control the rule of the feudal landlords and capitalists over the country as a whole would become impossible. The oil workers would attract the rest of the Persian workers and peasants to them and a workers’ and farmers’ government would be established. Such a government would be a true and loyal friend of Socialist Britain, a reliable antagonist to both Russia and American imperialism.

With the hep of capital investments British imperialism held, exploited and oppressed hundreds of millions of people. With an active anti-imperialist policy of renouncing and fighting these capitalist imperialists, a Socialist Britain would be able to fid hundreds of millions of allies in the struggle for socialism, against the imperialist war for the division of the world, for peace.

Socialist Review

Vol. 1, No. 6, August-September 1951

2007-03-07T20:16:00.000-08:00

International Working Women's Day

Today is not Women's Day it is International Working Women's Day and it is a socialist celebration of our Sisters and Mothers. it is a celebration of the part they have and will play in the struggle for communism and the destruction of class society.

It is a day on which we should reflect on the disgrace it is that feminists have stolen, just as the petty bourgeoisie always pick the pockets of the workers, this socialist celebration from the workers' movement. It is a day on which we should reflect on the fate of those women who strive for equal rights, including reproductive rights, in Iraq.

It is a day on which we should reflect on the fact that in Britain today working women remain underpaid and largely confined to low status occupations. That so many young male workers are also consigned to such occupations is not a triumph for womens' liberation, though without doubt may feminists will regard it as a triumph over men in general, but evidence of the defeats of the past come back to haunt the whole of the working class today.

While talking of the past and its remembrance let us recall that it was in 1910 at a conference held by the Socialist International in Copenhagen that Clara Zetkin, pictured above in that year with Rosa Luxemburg, moved the resolution that March 8 be forever International Working Womens' Day. Let us also note that the building in which the conference was held was until this week the Ungdomshuset which, without doubt, many of our sisters have fought to defend from the violence of the police only this week.

2007-03-07T19:27:00.000-08:00

Reasons to Admire The People of the United States of America

Hal Draper

(1914-1990)

One of the themes of turncoat vermin masquerading as socialists and pro-war liberal trash both is that 'the left' is anti-American. It's an easy lie told by drunken buffoons who spend more time drinking their expense accounts than they do seeking out the truth. But no matter in but a few short years these clowns will be forgotten so I'll say no more for the moment.

The truth is rather more complex and the genuine socialist left, that part of the socialist left which fought both Stalinism and knew it to be but another form of class society, has never been anti-American. Quite the contrary the anti-Stalinist left has long looked to and talked of the important role which American socialists and the American working class will play in the destruction of class society.

Approximately a hundred years ago Lenin, a man who greatly admired American ingenuity and industry, pointed to the similarities between Russia and the USA. And rightly so as it was no accident that serfdom and slavery were destroyed, by a rising youthful capitalism, at the same point in history for similar reasons.

The similarities and contrasts between the two countries remain today modified only by the defeat of the old USSR in the Cold War and the shattering of most of its empire. The tragedy being that the USSR was destroyed from within by virtue of its being unable to compete with the larger, more efficient, economy of the USA and not by the working class. A working class that was, due to Stalinism, leaderless and lacked consciousness of its social revolutionary nature.
The American empire by contrast is intact its maw dripping with fresh blood. But internally it is as rotten as the old USSR ever was containing within its borders the seeds of its destruction. Sadly those best able to destroy the nightmarish colossus that is official America are as leaderless and as lacking in consciousness as their Russian comrades were and are.

Nonetheless there have always been devoted and brave comrades who have fought in the very belly of the beast to develop class consciousness amongst those whose destiny it is to bring down the clay colossus that bestrides the globe. This post, the first of a series, aims to simply remind the few brave souls who read this blog that of some of those heroic figures. In pride of place Hal Draper, now go read his pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism.

2007-03-04T17:56:00.000-08:00

HATE THE POLICE

Mommy, mommy, mommy
Look at your son
You might have loved me
But now I got a gun
You better stay out of my way
I think I've had a bad day
I've had a bad day
I've had a bad day

Daddy, daddy, daddy
Proud of your son
Got himself a good job
Killing niggers and Mexicans
I'll tell you one thing, it's true
You can't find justice, it'll find you
It'll find you
It'll find you

People tell policemen
They've met their match
Down in them desert sands
Mudhoney won't catch
Mudhoney hates policemen, yes, it's true
You can't find justice, it'll find you
It'll find you
It'll find youIt'll find you

Mommy, mommy
Look at your son
You might have loved me
A gun
You better stay out of my way
I've had a bad day
I've had a bad day
Mommy, I've had a bad day
Mommy, I've had a bad day
Mommy

2007-02-13T18:50:00.000-08:00

What Kind of Programme?

Introduction by Neprimerimye

The document below belongs to a debate that took place in the International Socialists in the early 1970’s. It was but one of many contributions to a debate that was in the end fruitless in that no programme was ever published. In fact the debate was never satisfactorily concluded and the very idea of a programme became something of a touchstone for successive oppositional tendencies within the group.

The debate rumbled on through the early 1970’s as IS developed a small foothold in the working class with pride of place being given to the toeholds in blue collar industries. By 1974 IS was the largest and most theoretically grounded of the revolutionary groups. It was beginning what was hoped to be its transformation into the core of a revolutionary communist party based in the mass production industries. It was not to be and within a year its toeholds in blue collar industry and a large section of the central cadre of the group had departed from the organisation.

One result of the factional havoc wreaked on IS was that the question of a programme for the group was quietly forgotten about by everybody concerned. The debate too was to be left forgotten, orphaned and lonesome in the pages of dusty Internal Bulletins, hidden away in attics and suburban garages. Several drafts and numerous contributions to the debate were simply washed away as if the subject had not been raised at all. And when the IS was rebranded as the Socialist Workers Party the new party failed to adopt a programme.

Nevertheless fragments thrown off by the IS did adopt programmes and made grandiose claims for their productions. Indeed it was claimed that so called programmatic work was absolutely vital to the construction of a new revolutionary party. Years after beginning such work the small groups which took this approach are of course no larger but rather older in composition than they were all those years ago. More to the point the programmes so proudly produced have proven to be wrong in part and useless in general.

Despite which the argument that a new revolutionary party based on a new programme can be heard from time to time in the less well populated, if sometimes more intelligent and certainly better read, sections of the far left. Even sections of the Guardian reading intelligentsia (sic) have felt the need for a programme of sorts and have been provided with one by George Monbiot the radical aristocrat. Not to be left out the equally aristocratic theoretician of the SWP, Alex Callinicos, has produced his own personal programme. The latter being an interesting contribution as it can be argued that it is not a revolutionary programme but a programme of something vague and amorphous, an anti-capitalist manifesto as its author described it, whatever that might mean.

It is a sad pass indeed when one of the leading revolutionaries in this country can produce a programme that is not explicitly revolutionary at a time when the party he is a member of has no programme at all. Which latter point a cynic might point to as an advantage for the leadership of that party. The author of this introduction is however of the opinion that it is but a consequence of the failure of the revolutionary leader concerned, and of his party as a whole, to place the working class at the centre of their work on all levels other than the historical.

In light of the above then the document below is reproduced here to illustrate some of the concerns of revolutionaries when last this debate was taken up by a revolutionary organisation that sought to win a hearing within the working classes. It was, it should be noted, but a single contribution to what was a long and largely verbal debate. It has then the fault, if we may call it that, of drawing on past debates in the revolutionary movement and directing us to those debates rather than seeking to innovate. More importantly it makes the point, or rather repeats the point first made by Lenin, that a revolutionary programme, and by extension the revolutionary party, cannot but develop out of the struggle of the working classes against capitalist exploitation.

The essential irreducible argument of the document being that only an organisation that seeks to root itself in the struggles of the working class both theoretically and in practice can develop a genuinely revolutionary programme. The alternative, especially in a period characterised by a low strike level and few social struggles of any size, is for small socially isolated political revolutionary groups to write programmes which only further illustrate the distance between them and the organised workers movement leave alone the class as a whole. Such an undertaking can only reinforce tendencies towards academicism and substitutionism and must be fought if revolutionary clarity is the aim of any discussion as to the question of what kind of programme.

***

What Kind of Programme?

Steve Jeffries

For years IS has not had a programme. We have published journals, and newspapers, books and pamphlets, but along with our correct reluctance to declare ourselves the Party, there has been until now little sustained pressure to produce a Programme.

The reason for this has nothing to do with a lack of theory or perspectives. At any time during the past five years we could have mobilised our resources to produce a document that contained the IS world-view, our Marxism, our origins, traditions and future. No, our non-production of a Programme has itself been a more or less conscious result of our understanding of exactly what a Marxist programme is about.

The first thing that a Marxist Programme is about is the relationship between organised revolutionaries and the working class movement, a relationship that is above all an active one. Thus in 1899 Lenin advanced three reasons why the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party should adopt a Programme: “the tremendous importance of a Programme for the consolidation and consistent activity of a political party; the fact that a period of fierce polemics about Russian Marxism had just ended; and lastly because the upswing in activity of both workers and revolutionaries “showed clearly that the demand for a Programme grew out of the needs of the movement itself”. (A Draft Programme of our Party”).

Engels had made a similar point a quarter of a century earlier when he wrote to Bebel about the Gotha Programme that “as a rule, the official Programme of a Party is less important than what it does”. If the Party doesn’t do anything, or is too small and the working class too passive for its actions to mean anything, then the Programme becomes totally unimportant. In these circumstances Marxists would still retain their theories and perspectives, but the element that distinguishes a Marxist Programme from any other variety utopian or bourgeois, the overriding notion of active organisation in struggle to change the world, would be missing.

IS is now in the throes of debate as to what our programme should contain precisely because our relationship with the working class is becoming increasingly active. We are now contending for leadership in particular situations, and many workers are beginning to look for leadership from us. Our Programme, therefore, must provide an overall revolutionary strategy responsive to the needs of the working class in the present period.

Later in the same article quoted above, Lenin summarises the requirements of the Programme as follows:

“The Programme must formulate our basic views; precisely establish our immediate political tasks; point out the immediate demands that must show the area of agitational activity; give unity to the agitational work, expand and deepen it from fragmentary partial agitation for petty, isolated demands to the status of agitation for the sum total of Social-Democratic demands”.
Attacking Plekhanov’s “Second Draft Programme” some three years later, Lenin sharply criticised its resemblance to an academic commentary on international capitalism as exemplified in Russia:

“The Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Party should begin with a definition (and indictment) of Russian capitalism - and only then stress the international character of the movement….”

And explaining what such a “definition” would involve, he adds:

“As to what capitalism is - that will of itself follow from our definition of exactly how matters stand.”

He adopts this approach because his Programme is aimed at the “fighting proletariat”, and not at intellectuals or as a contribution to inner-Party education.

It is totally wrong to reject Lenin’s starting point, as comrade Hallas did at the June NC, by arguing that Lenin’s Programme could start there only because their audience was fully acquainted with the Marxist world-view as established in the widely-circulated Erfurt Programme of the German Social-Democrats. Lenin chose his starting point because as a Marxist he believed that being determines consciousness:

“The fighting proletariat learns what capitalism is, not from academic definitions (as one learns from textbooks), but from practical acquaintance with the contradictions of capitalism and with the development of society and its consequences.” (“On Plekhanov’s Second Draft Programme”, 1902).

It is this view of the Programme’s readership, and not false assumptions about its prior knowledge of international Marxists writings, that persuaded Lenin to begin with a clear statement of the pace and character of capitalist development in Russia.

Later on in the same article, he spells out his position even more clearly. Because the Programme is an active weapon in the hands of the Party, it should contain “only what the contradictions of capitalism consists in and what its tendency is”. Quoting Engels on that same Erfurt Programme, he repeats “All that is superfluous in a Programme weakens it”, and goes on to suggest that “all explanations of why things are proceeding in just thins way” should be left to accompanying commentaries.

Seeing the Programme as an important item in the Party’s armoury, should it then lay down highly detailed policy statements? This was another area investigated by Lenin in those early years of the Russian Social-Democratic party. His conclusion was that the Programme can only lay down the principles and strategy within which Party Congresses, the leadership and the members operate tactically.

“questions of tactics can hardly be introduced in the Programme (with the exception of the most important questions, questions of principle, such as our attitude to other fighters against autocracy).” (“A Draft Programme of our Party” 1899).

And writing of which basic working class demands to include he continues:

“In drawing up this section of the Programme, we should strive, therefore, to avoid two extremes - on the one hand, we must not omit any one of the main basic demands that hold great significance for the entire working class; on the other, we must not go into minute particulars with which it would hardly be rational to load the Programme”.

The debate inside Isis primarily between those who support the general line of the Leninist Programme, and those who, pricked by accusations of anti-intellectualism, feel the need to produce an “IS Manifesto” that might rank in future with good old Marx’s. It is not that we don’t need such a general statement of a Revolutionary Socialist world-view for the 1970’s. In my synopsis of a Programme (reproduced in this bulletin) I argued that the “Draft Programme” rejected at Conference should form the basis of some kind of IS Manifesto. But we cannot afford the luxury of producing such a work as our Programme.

The IS Programme should if possible represent an advance on Lenin’s, and most certainly not a retreat. It must be shaped as a weapon to guide, develop and deepen our members’ intervention in the class struggle, and must positively assist the building of the Party. By establishing clear principles and an overall strategy, it guards against both opportunism and dogmatism. Against opportunism by limiting the scope of tactical manoeuvres to those which do not conflict with our principles. And against dogmatism by encouraging the membership to determine changes in tactics in response to the developing struggle.

The General Line of the synopsis rejected by the June NC was an attempt at indicating the main direction of such a Programme. It began with a picture of the main tendencies at work in present-day British capitalism. It then described the major contradictions in the system (without neglecting its international character, as comrade Hallas charged), and went on to pick out British capitalism as one weak link in the chain. Turning to the consequences of this for the major classes in Britain, it then focussed in depth on the working class response, and in particular on the combination of developed trade union organisation with virtual political impotence. The rejection of the politics of reformism (obviously including the CP) then led on to a general statement of the need for a working class revolutionary party. This party has both immediate and long term aims which were then to be spelled out in the course of which its commitment to the International class struggle would be strongly emphasised.

The second half of this synopsis was basically about IS and our strategy for building such a Party. It reviewed our origins, which are clearly related to the consequences of the international decay of organised Marxism from the 1920’s. but because the document is a Programme an not anything else, only the broad line should be drawn in here, with the details being left to a separate manifesto or commentary. Finally, it isolated the main guiding principles behind our strategy for the revolution, and related them to our principle positions in the major arenas of the class struggle.

Such a programme at least attempts to answer the questions that a Marxist programme should - why be a revolutionary, what do revolutionaries think about the major world issues, and how should a revolutionary best work for the revolution? The danger of the old rejected “Draft Programme” and of the decision by the June NC to reject rather than amend my “Draft Synopsis”, is that the thinking behind it doesn’t appear to even recognise the questions. It is turning inwards and not out towards the “fighting proletariat”.

Steve Jeffries

Glasgow North branch

IS Bulletin August 1972

2007-01-28T13:23:00.000-08:00

For Democracy Within the Labour Movement

By Michael Kidron

TRADE UNION DEMOCRACY - WHERE?

The Labour Party Conference at Scarborough and the wave of strikes in the docks and in London Transport have raised the issue of democracy within our Movement. We must not let it be quietly buried.

The voting at Scarborough was a farce. The big union bosses, some of whom need fear nothing from the rank and file as they never stand for re-election, put their millions of votes at the disposal of the NEC - in support of German Rearmament, in support of SEATO, against every attempt of the rank and file of their own unions to tie their hands.

The crassest example of this insulting attitude to rank and file opinion was the case of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers’ vote on German Rearmament. The Society’s executive were explicitly mandated to oppose German Rearmament. In the event, the executive succumbed to NEC pressure and voted for it. This last-minute switch lost the vote on German Rearmament for the Left.

TRADE UNION DEMOCRACY - HOW?

How is it that the Constituency Labour Party delegates to Conference voice the opinion of the rank and file labour Party member, while the Union delegates generally do not? For one thing, the Constituency parties, being smaller, are much more amenable to rank and file pressure. But mainly, the reason lies in the fact that their delegates to Conference are elected, not selected from a permanent staff. The delegate if chosen because he holds views along the lines of those expressed in the local Party’s resolutions, not because he happens to express the views held by the Party machine.

A glimpse of the same type of democratic expression can sometimes be caught in the Trade Union world too. At the Trades Union Congress, the 300,000 textile workers vote according to their various sub-divisions; weavers, spinners, carders, etc. all vote separately. At the annual labour party Conference, the 300,000 votes are cast in one bloc. This year, for example, the textile workers were evenly split on the question of German Rearmament at the Brighton Congress - One month later, at Scarborough, all 300,000 were cast in the ballot box for German Rearmament.

What can happen at the Trades Union Congress can happen at the Labour Party Conference. Union delegates must be made responsible to the rank and file membership. Each delegate must represent only a certain number of members. They must be elected specifically for Conference on the basis of the views they hold publicly.

This applies not only to delegates to Conference but to all policy-making officers of the unions. They must stand for frequent election and be subject to instantaneous dismissal by the rank and file. Responsibility for the rank and file member of a union must rest with the rank and file - not with a small body of paid men who lose contact with their electors as soon as they meet the bosses.

THE BRIDLINGTON AGREEMENT

The responsibility of the rank and file grows tremendously during an industrial dispute. At such a time, sensitivity of union officials to the wishes of the membership is of paramount importance. Nothing must stand in the way of the conscious intervention of the rank and file in its own affairs.

At present, one of the weapons used by the TUC General Council to prevent such intervention is the Bridlington agreement, a ruling of the TUC which states that no union may enrol any members “claimed” by another union while that union is engaged in an industrial dispute. The Agreement is now being invoked by the Transport and general Workers Union to prevent the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers (the Blue Union) from enrolling dissatisfied T & G members. It is only one weapon in the arsenal used to smash the small, militant union, but it is of importance because of the principle involved.

Within the Capitalist system, the working class must constantly be on guard against attacks on their living standards. One of the means of defence is the unions. But the unions themselves are powerless without the weapon of last resort: the strike - first the industrial strike, then the political one. When a union bureaucracy virtually outlaws the strike weapon, condemns every strike as unofficial, tries t bully its members into returning to work as a preliminary to “conducting negotiations” and, in short, does every bit of dirty work for the bosses that the bosses cannot do for themselves, that union bureaucracy can do noting for its members. It holds no terror for the bosses. Such a bureaucratically run union is the TGWU.

The officials of the T&GWU are as skilful negotiators as any. But of what use are negotiations without the threat of force? If the T&GWU caves in when it comes to a strike, its members must have every right to withdraw from it and join any other union that shows fight. In the case of the dockers, it means joining the NASD.

But what about poaching? Won’t a giant like the T&GWU be able to “bribe” members of other unions to join them by offering lower membership fees etc? it certainly may, but the final test for its own members always remains: does the union obtain better conditions, or does it not? A union that spends all its resources on “poaching” members from the others will have very little time for fighting the bosses. It will find itself spending more and more time “poaching” back its own members that have left.

Whoever support a agreement for ”spheres of influence” within the Labour Movement, like the Bridlington agreement, shows little trust in the discretion of the workers. And as always when it comes to relying on the workers’ own initiative, Arthur Deakin and Harry Pollitt vie with one another in trying to escape the direct control of the rank and filer and work through the “machine:” Deakin shouts “Bridlington agreement” and Pollitt returns the chorus: “Let no poaching of one union’s members by another take place under any circumstances.” (Daily Worker, 15/10/54). We ask one question of the Deakin-Pollitt axis: Who should chose whom? Unions their members or members their unions? But the bureaucrats of both sides know where they stand - kill all independent rank and file action, kill an independent militant union like the NASD.

Rank and filers of the Labour Movement must press for free choice: For the election of all policy-making officials and delegates. For the direct responsibility of such representatives to their electors and the right of instantaneous dismissal. For the revoking of the Bridlington Agreement.

* M Kidron’s remarks on the Bridlington Agreement do not reflect the views of the editors of Socialist Review. Controversy on the subject will be welcomed. - Editor.

Socialist Review Vol 4 No 3, November 1954

2007-01-16T17:58:00.000-08:00

Exclusive!

War Pigs discovered to be Ye Oldest English Folk Song!!!!!

Many of my devoted readers will know of the renowned traditional music group Black Sabbath but Neprimerimye blog can now exclusively reveal that one of their best known songs, War Pigs, is in fact a translation of an ancient English folk song. The song was discovered when Sir Ozzy, surely a knighthood cannot long be delayed, was supervising an archeaological excavation in downtown Birmingham late in 1968. That Sir Ozzy was prior to his entering the field of sacred music a promising young professor of archeaology has been concealed for years by the story that he was a grave digger by forces we cannot name here. What Sir Ozzy discovered was groundbreaking in its cultural significance the original Latin lyrics of War Pigs, which are to be found below, without doubt the oldest English folk song known dating from circa 666.

Verres Militares

Centuriones convene runt,
Sicut magi sacris migris -
Mentes malae destructionis,
Artifices omnes mortis.
Campis corpera comburit
Belli machina laborans.
perturb runt mentes sanas.

Eheu, Deus!

Venefici se abstrudunt nunc,
Qui bellum incoherent.
Ipsi pugnam cur ineant?
Cogunt ire pauperes, vae!

Poena subit various,
Qui per jocum bellant.
Gentes tractant sicut pecudes,
Dum nigra venit hora, vae!

Nunc tenebrous mundus horret
Cum auditis: flammae torrent.
Verres non jam habent nervos.
Dei manus trudit fervens.
Hora nigra Dei advenit.
Supplicantes verres repunt,
Peccatores precantur,
Satan ridet, laetatur.

Eheu, Deus!

2007-01-16T13:55:00.000-08:00

Alibi!

Victory to the Resistance

Afterword

Alibi! Arms for Spain

Why Only the Working Classes can Defeat Imperialism and Fascism.

In 1939 as the Spanish Civil War drew to a close and as storm clouds darkened over Europe a small pamphlet, reproduced below, appeared over the signature of A. B. Elsbury. It was published by the Revolutionary Socialist League, an ephemeral grouping later renamed the Revolutionary Workers League, its circulation was tiny. Despite decades of obscurity it remains however an excellent critique of class collaborationism with considerable relevance to today’s much changed political scene.

Before proceeding to an examination of the pamphlet the reader should be aware that Elsbury had by 1939 a long and honourable record in the workers movement. If today, like his once more famous brother Sam, he is unknown to all but a tiny number of specialists in labour history then that is but a sad reflection of the degeneration of a movement that by forgetting its history surrenders its claim on the future too. Ben Elsburys part in the history of the labour movement in Britain may be reckoned a small one when measured against other better know figures but it was an honourable one as at all times he stood foursquare with his class. Which cannot be said of those many contemporaries who gave their allegiance to the Labour and Stalinist parties.

As early as 1909 Elsbury was noted by Tom Mann as one of the first heralds of the then new methods of organising the class along the lines of industry not craft in his role as author of the pamphlet Industrial Unionism. He was also one of that small minority of militants who in opposing the first imperialist world war from its outset saving the honour of the working class by their heroic actions. Following which he became a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain only leaving after his brother became one of the victims of the ultra left lunacy of the Third Period that saw Sam betrayed and pilloried by the Stalinist misleaders. Despite which Ben remained a revolutionist joining CLR James Marxist Group whilst a member of the Independent Labour Party from which he found his way into the Revolutionary Socialist League.

The main thrust of Elsbury’s pamphlet is to show that the slogan Arms for Spain was an alibi for the failure of the workers parties, in particular the so called communist parties, to fight fascism by using working class methods. His argument is that military methods alone cannot defeat fascism but will play into its hands by strengthening the bourgeois state. He goes on to make the point that fascism is better countered by the use of working class methods of struggle, that is to say by the use of the strike weapon up to and including the calling of a political general strike, by mass street demonstrations and ultimately by the overthrow of the bourgeois state by insurrection.

The same general point can be made in relation to the struggle against the on going rape of Iraq by imperialism. Only today it is groups which claim to stand in the Trotskyist tradition which provide an alibi for their failure to orientate on the working classes and to advocate working class methods of struggle when they raise the militant sounding slogan Victory to the Resistance! And in pursuit of this slogan rather than seek to mobilise the working class as the leading force in the fight against imperialisms despoiling of Iraq they resort instead to exactly the same tactics as did the Stalinists in the 1930’s.

In fact what we have seen from Britain’s official anti war movement, the Stop the War Coalition, has mirrored the old Stalinist peacenik campaigns of yesteryear to a remarkable degree. We have seen mass demonstrations that lead nowhere in particular but simply call for peace and we have seen conferences which allow leaders to posture and preen but lead to nothing but the next demo or the next conference. Yet as the size of the demonstrations fall the politics become ever more openly pacifist in tone with little being said about the role of the working classes either by the STWC or by its main organisational backer the Socialist Workers’ Party. No mistake then that a Stalinist can happily work with the SWP as part of the leadership of the STWC given that its populist and pacifist politics draw more from Stalinist Popular Frontism than from the revolutionary Leninism the SWP claims to adhere to.

Indeed in contrast to earlier single issue campaigns the SWP has not so much as suggested the formation of workplace or industry based groups. At best a conference, along the .lines of the Peoples Assembly gab fests must suffice. Meanwhile the more rooted, albeit in the lower ranks of the bureaucracies. Labour Against the War, is left untroubled by the SWP, so much for the United Front! Meanwhile the average size of the demonstrations fall, local activities are few and the calls for action from the leadership of the STWC become ever more hysterical as the next demonstration or the next conference are claimed to be more important than the last.

But not to matter the next demonstration or the next conference will mark a breakout of the left ghetto and the anti war movement will triumph. Although what a triumph might be is left vague and one can but guess that the desired triumph is the cessation of war in Iraq, as is the official policy of the STWC, but for the core activists belonging to the SWP and the other groups which raise the slogan Victory to the Resistance! A militant sounding slogan that has its antecedents in the cry once heard from wide sections of the far left, but not by the forerunners of the SWP the International Socialists, victory to the IRA! For the good reason that such a slogan both divides and derails the anti war movement.

Just as the slogan victory to the IRA repelled many who wanted the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland so too does the slogan Victory to the Resistance today. Not only do the terrorist methods of the IRA and that multi-headed hydra that is the resistance repel many enemies of imperialism but they are also inimical to the methods of working class struggle in that they substitute the armed bands of fighters to the mass democratic struggles of the organised working classes.

Would the military victory of the resistance signify a defeat of imperialism? No it would not it would at best mean the defeat of a particular group of imperialist powers. In fact I can say with absolute certainty that all of those groups involved with the resistance would happily seek a compromise with imperialism the very day the last British or American soldier leavers the soil of Iraq. Just as Sinn Fein has reached an agreement with British imperialism and the Vietnamese Stalinists have with American imperialism.

Worse the slogan Victory to the Resistance is more often than not interpreted to mean victory to the communally based militias and the terror gangs, although criticisms are always found in the small print of the more noxious fascist groups that form part of the resistance, almost to the exclusion of those forces which resist by other means. That those forces are in the first instance the trades unions and the socialist propaganda groups is passed over in silence and when it is noticed they are dismissed as quislings or worse. That the left has failed to convince the leading elements of the Iraqi left who were in exile during the Baathist tyranny speaks to their lack of any grasp of proletarian internationalism but does explain why much of that left has adopted a strategy that combines elements of leftist sectarianism with Popular Frontism.

The slogan Victory to the Resistance is not an anti-imperialist slogan but an alibi for the refusal of the far left to even attempt to place the working classes, in both Iraq and Britain, at the centre of their analysis. That only working class methods of struggle can defeat imperialism and not just a specific set of imperialist powers is evaded as forces opposed to the very idea of progress are lauded as anti-imperialists. Meanwhile the Iraqi working class is ignored and denied any independent class voice just as in Spain under the Popular Front and the capacity of the working class in Britain to resist imperialism is given lip service only.

Ironically in light of the claims by many that the slogan victory to the resistance is an expression of Revolutionary Defeatism it has served to defeat the anti war movement by preventing the working class from taking the centre stage which is its historic right. And this at a time when bourgeois defeatism is growing as a current in light of the role of the reactionary anti-imperialists of the resistance. On the morrow a new nightmare will be unleashed on Iraq and the far left in Britain will bear some small part of the responsibility for the renewed horrors that will follow.

2007-01-15T03:21:00.000-08:00

ALIBI!

Arms for Spain

By A B Elsbury

The slogan “Arms for Spain” has been an extremely popular one in all the democratic countries since the inception of the Spanish Civil War. It has been shouted with great enthusiasm, not only in working class demonstrations of the Labour, Socialist and Communist parties, but also in those of the liberal and other democratic parties. It has been publicised in the press of these parties, on the hoardings, on banners, in every possible form. It conveyed not only the sympathy of its users with the Spanish Popular Front Government in its war against Franco and his allies, but was represented as a programme for this government.

How does the fascist Franco maintain the fight against the legitimate Spanish Government?

“Obviously by means of his access to superior armaments from the hands of his fascist allies, combined with the deprivation of arms to the government forces resulting from the application of the non-intervention agreement on the part of the democratic countries. Such is the background of the slogan “Arms for Spain”, one of the most popular international slogans since the famous “War to End War”.

Is it a good slogan from the point of view of the workers, whether Spanish, British or International? Does it represent their attitude and objectives? Is it likely to further the interests of the workers in Spain or elsewhere? Did it furnish a means of attacking the fascist enemies of the workers in Spain and I other countries?

An answer to these questions is of vital importance to the working class movement in its fight for working class power and socialism. If the slogan is a fitting one judged by this criterion, it should be supported. If not, it should be mercilessly exposed. Let us examine it in this light.

Would a sufficiency of arms have brought victory to the Spanish government? This is the major question posed by the slogan “Arms for Spain”, and upon its answer depends the correctness or error of the movements which supported it. The question is one of the utmost seriousness and its answer is by no means as simple as has been assumed. Let us preface our reply by an extract from one of the master tacticians in revolutionary strategy in 1919 as follows:-

“How can we explain the miracle that the Soviet power has managed to maintain itself for two years in a backward, impoverished and war-weary country, in spite of the obstinate struggle waged against it, at first by German imperialism, which at that time was regarded as omnipotent, and then by the imperialism of the Entente… Regarded from the standpoint of a simple calculation of forces, of a calculation of military strength, that is indeed a miracle, for the Entente was, and is, immeasurably more powerful than we… We have deprived the Entente of its soldiers. We replied to its immense military and technical superiority, thanks to the solidarity of the toilers against the imperialist governments”.

(Lenin, Selected Works, Vol 1. VIII, pp. 51 and 54).

Lenin here, with his usual acuteness, brings an entirely different outlook to the problem. “Military and technical superiority” are by no means “things in themselves” to him, and with the overwhelming example of the Russian revolution to support his thesis, he proves what has been proved a thousand times in history in a practical manner.

From the days of the Spartacist revolt in ancient Rome up to the time of the French revolutionary wars and also in the Boer War and Irish struggle, innumerable examples are to be found of the definite superiority of unarmed and semi-armed masses over highly equipped mercenary forces, providing their morale is superior. Dependence on military superiority is a fetish of the brainless militarists and is, in fact, being abandoned by the most modern military statesmen - themselves taught their lesson most painfully and efficiently by Lenin and Trotsky, in the years 1918-1921. We declare categorically that the answer to the question we have posed is a decided negative. Franco is not winning by reason of his superiority of arms, and the reason must be sought elsewhere.

“Even the best arms are useless”, admits a Fascist military strategist, “if nobody is willing and able to use them”. (Maj. Gen. Franke, quoted in “Germany, Poland, World Empire or World Revolution” by G. Reimann).

A striking illustration of this point comes with the news of the fall of Barcelona that “100 modern American machine-guns were actually found by the fascists in their crates UNPACKED!” (Workers International News” Feb 1939). Of the vast stores of other equipment similarly found we shall not speak (the 10 million gallons of petrol, for example) the main point we wish to make here being that the Spanish Government, despite its undoubted deficiencies in war material, possessed a vast supremacy in man power, combined with equipment far in excess of the Bolsheviks of Russia during the years 1918-21.

We thus see that lack of arms is not the explanation for the Spanish debacle, nor the explanation for its major cause, the lack of morale, to which alone it can be attributed.

This was known before hand by most of the organisations responsible for, and participating in the “Arms for Spain” movement, and obviously by the Communist International, for whom the lessons of the Russian Revolution and the works of Lenin should have been a guide.

On the official communist parties of the world rests the heaviest responsibility for this pernicious slogan. These parties, trained in Leninism knew without question the menace which was involved in the specious and lying formula “Arms for Spain”.

They knew that the slogan took responsibility for the Spanish conflict away from the workers’ movement, Spanish and international, and placed it on the shoulders of their class enemies, the Chamberlains, Hitlers and Mussolinis, whose capitalist responsibility is implicit and inherent. To blame the tiger for acting as it must is almost the limit in idiocy.

They knew that “Arms for Spain” divorced the workers from real activity on behalf of the Spanish workers and forced them instead into empty parliamentary phrase-mongering against their political governments for futile demands for “recognition”.

They knew that “Arms for Spain” was mere claptrap which meant no solidarity with the workers of Spain, but did mean solidarity with the Liberals and other anti-Socialist enemies of the workers who took up the cry enthusiastically - precisely because it involved only polite, parliamentary “demands” which they themselves, when in power, would certainly refuse.

All this both the Communists and their allies have known. “Arms for Spain” provided a brilliant and resounding phrase which served as an attractive façade behind which they could act as a “Popular Front” towards the workers, exuding their sympathy - and even a few thousands of surplus cash, some of which has filtered into selected channels in Spain. Of working class action, a minimum, of sympathy, a surplus, of real explanation of the Spanish situation, a complete albescence.

Of the real facts of Spain, from a workers’ standpoint, we have space here for only an outline.

When Franco revolted against a Popular Front Government on June 17th 1936 that government for the space of 48 hours refused to arm the workers and even attempted to allay their alarm with lying communiqués.

The workers of Madrid and Catalonia, mainly syndicalist, took up arms and themselves drove out the fascists and along with them their big employers and landlords. A revolutionary situation developed. Factories were occupied , land was seized, the sole power was that of the workers and peasants. The morale of these workers and peasants was invincible. With bare hands, often, they faced the misled troops, fraternised with them, and enrolled them in the workers’ army. The “heroic” government came to Catalonia and pleaded for assistance from the triumphant workers’ organisations. Instead of booting them out as Kerensky was kicked out, the workers’ leaders, Anarchist, POUM, (equivalent to the British ILP) and Communist, agreed to collaborate with them and even to join them. Gradually the workers’ revolution was sabotaged, more and more power was relinquished to the government, mainly at the insistence of the Communists (whose revolutionary reputation based on the Russian Revolution was still effective). Gradually the period of “Dual Power” (Workers’ Government and state machine) ended in favour of the state. The workers learned gradually through the Government, Communist and even Anarchist press that they were fighting for a “democratic” Government and not for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic. All the leaders who had doubts about it were arrested, kidnapped or shot by the police who were now under Communist Party control. Durutti, Bernieri, Nin, Erwin Wolff, etc. the prisons were filled with Anarchists and Socialists, many of whom were foreigners who had come to fight for the Spanish revolution as so many fought for Russia in 1918-21. The voluntary army which had freed Catalonia completely from the fascist hordes and displayed the initiative which had produced the Russian “miracle” of which Lenin speaks was formalised, at Communist Party insistence, (!) into a capitalist military force with the usual accompaniments of well-paid officers and poorly paid privates, salutes, etc. The morale of the army slumped and the period of fascist triumphs commenced. The land and factories were taken back from the workers and peasants and restored to the returning landlords and owners who had been reassured by the government of their “democratic” rights of property. The Moors who had been the spearhead of the fascist attack, and who could have been converted into allies or at least neutralised by a declaration of Moroccan independence by the Government, were used as tools by Franco and almost eliminated in front line fighting. City after City fell without a shot into Franco’s hands, even the impregnable Bilbao. And now comes the fall of Barcelona in the first chapter of the “democratic” as opposed to the revolutionary fight against Franco.

Once again the bitter lesson is being learned that the alternative of “Fascism versus democracy”, the Stalinist and liberal slogan, is as false as its kindred slogan of “Arms to Spain“. It leads everywhere to defeat, outrage and slaughter of the workers. Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and now Spain give the irrevocable answers. The alternative is not between black slavery and pink slavery, between open fascism and disguised democratic fascism. The alternative is Fascism (in all its forms) versus Socialism.

Despite all the lies of renegade socialists and communists, the lessons of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky must be hammered home to the only class which can fight fascism, the working class. Not only theoretically but practically this is the finding of history. As Reimann proves, “A proletarian revolutionises military strategy and tactics, because the soldiers of a revolutionary army, who know how to handle modern machines and arms, know at the same time what they are fighting and dying for.

When the Workers fight for themselves instead of for capitalist myths then, and then only, are they irresistible. Socialism is the only hope. All else is illusion.

Revolutionary Booklets no. 1
Published by Revolutionary Socialist League, 20/2/39
Pioneer Bookshop, 268 Upper Street, Islington.

2007-01-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

Afterword

IS Policy Statement on Industrial Work

The importance of the Policy Statement on Industrial Work adopted by the International Socialists in 1971 lies in that none of the established leaders of IS wrote it. There can be no doubt that had Jim Higgins, as the groups most authoritative trades unionist, or any of the leading theorists of IS written the document that it would have been superior in every way. Except it would not have represented, as it does, the collective experience of that small layer of industrial, primarily blue collar, militants who had been won to IS in the previous few years.

It represents the collective views of the most politically advanced militants with regard to internal union democracy and its relationship to the struggle against the employers. It represents a set of views that were not confined to IS, although best represented by the organisation, but were to be found throughout the entire workers movement at the height of post-war militancy from which time the document dates. The role of IS in the production of the document was that of a fraction of the class defined by its politics but not separate from the class, or the embryonic vanguard within it, as a whole.

This is in contrast to the role played by the ‘orthodox Trotskyists’ of the period who also had a small following within the class. They, namely the Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy, saw their task as bringing knowledge of sacred scriptures (the Transitional Program, etc.) to the workers and thereby enlightening them. This policy, substitutionist by its very nature, was seen as being based on the idea of the revolutionary party bringing revolutionary class consciousness to the working class from outside its ranks, a parody of Kautskys views as quoted by Lenin in What Is To Be Done? and was often counter-posed to the supposed economism attributed to IS.

In fact the writing of the document bears witness to IS acting as a part of the class, of a party of its vanguard if you like, developing itself by developing roots within the class and its trade union organisations. Central to this effort was the development of rank and file bodies within the unions themselves but based on workplace or industrial location. Such a strategic conception being very different from the efforts of the orthodox whose entire efforts were to win ‘leadership’ in the class by counter-posing their own narrow party organisation to the reformist bureaucracy within the unions. In its concreteness having nothing abstract about it we may also legitimately contrast the rank and file strategy to the conception of a ‘class struggle left’ that the Mandelites touted at this time as they turned away from their infatuation with guerrilla warfare.

More importantly although the document could easily be subscribed to by the present day SWP it is arguable that its practice is very far from the IS conception of rank and fileism as represented in the Policy Statement. Despite its verbal genuflections to rank and fileism the practice of the SWP is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Mandelite idea of a class struggle left wing in its very amorphousness. Thus on the one hand the SWP claim to be producing rank and file papers, lacking any genuine basis of support from the union rank and file, while on the other hand their members on the executive of PCS vote to drop the ‘suspended strike’ on the pensions issue. This in contrast to the spirit of the Policy Statement which demanded negotiations with the bosses be subject to the ratification of mass meetings.

It should be noted just how much has changed in the field of trades unionism since the document was passed and how the context of 1971 shaped the document. Thus by demanding that negotiations be submitted to mass meetings the document reveals its roots as lying in the blue collar unions of the mass production industries of the time particularly engineering. Today even in that reduced industry mass meetings are rare and have always been less typical of white collar unionism. The Policy Statement is then marked by its origins from deep within a tradition of the British trade union movement which no longer exists on the same scale or in quite the same forms it did between the rise of the General Unions and the defeat of the Miners Strike.

Despite the restructuring of British capitalism since 1979 the efforts of IS to understand the lessons of earlier class struggles, as represented so well in the contents of the issue of the International Socialism journal in which the Policy Statement appeared (see here for a full list of contents), continues to yield results from which revolutionaries can benefit. For example the Policy Statement makes considerable efforts to develop a number of principles by which militants can struggle for workers’ democracy within the trades unions. One aspect of which struggle was the fight against bureaucratism and the co-option of militants into the bureaucracy itself.

Today, if anything, that anti-bureaucratic struggle is more important than it was in 1971. At that time in those plants where Joint Shop Steward Committees existed they were unofficial bodies outside the direct control of either the union bureaucracies or of the state. Today by contrast such committees are recognised and governed by both law and the union bureaucracies with the result that they have all too often become bureaucratised and incorporated into the machinery erected by the bosses to police the workers. Indeed despite the decrease in union density and absolute numbers of unionists there has been a proportionate increase in the size of the union bureaucracy parasitic on the dues paid by the rank and file membership.

It becomes even more important then for revolutionaries to emphasise the need to resist the union bureaucracies and their politics of class collaborationism. Given which it is critical to avoid the possibility of naïve revolutionaries becoming detached from their class base in the workplaces not only by virtue of accepting appointed positions in the union bureaucracy but also by becoming elected to leading committees when lacking support for class struggle policies. If anything the Policy Statement neglects these dual dangers as at the time it was written the number of serious activists of all political hues within the unions was far greater and the level of class struggle far higher so that such a likelihood was unlikely.

What may come as a shock to many young revolutionaries today is the stress placed on workplace organisation in the document. It is then worth contrasting it to those sections of the Transitional Program which discuss trades unionism marked as they are by the authors knowledge of the French working class scene and, to a lesser extent, by the then recent experiences of the American working class in forging the CIO. As such the Transitional Program points towards the absolute importance of workplace democracy in a fashion similar to the main drive of the Policy Statement although the specifics of this are obscured by the roots of the Transitional Program in a union tradition very different to those of Britain in 1971 a fact which the orthodox Trotskyists neglected to their cost.

What emerges from both the Policy Statement and the relevant sections of the Transitional Program is a commitment to workers’ democracy based on the workers own organs of struggle. Such organs, in the first instance strike committees and mass meetings, are however extremely unlikely to emerge if militants allow themselves to become enmeshed with the union bureaucracy when lacking support for their politics at grassroots level. The domination of say the PCS National Executive by members of various left groups is then meaningless when they cannot if so much as lift a finger to defend hard won pension rights. The same is true of the SWP members on the PCS executive who voted against strike action, not only were they betraying the interests of new entrants to the civil service for purely opportunist reasons, but they were also lining up against the need of the proletariat to learn from its own experiences of class struggle in favour of a conception of socialism that sees it as something which ‘leaders’ can deliver to the class through clever negotiations rather than something that must be fought for by the workers ourselves.

2007-01-06T07:58:00.000-08:00

International Socialists

Policy Statement on Industrial Work

1971

This policy statement was adopted at a conference of IS members active in industrial and trade union work, and endorsed by the National Committee. It gives the general guidelines for revolutionary socialists on the question. Of course a fight for ‘democracy’ in the abstract will not succeed. The democratic demands have to be linked, in every-case, with specific policy demands on wages, conditions, safety and so on. The formulation of realistic revolutionary policies in the various industries and unions is the task IS industrial militants are now tackling. The present statement is a common element in all of them.

Conference recognises that, under modern conditions, the trade union bureaucracy is a special social group which is used in the maintenance of capitalist class rule.

While the bureaucracy reflects in varying degrees at different times, the pressure of the membership, it also serves as an instrument through which the employers and the State try to discipline and control workers, to limit and often sabotage disputes, to check solidarity actions and to prevent the union of political and industrial struggles. This dual role does not depend mainly on the political outlook of the individual official, though this is of some importance. It depends on the actual position of the bureaucracy in capitalist society. The officials are a relatively privileged group organised in hierarchies enjoying better pay, conditions and, usually, job security than the rank and file militant. They are under very strong pressure to conform to the model of the ‘responsible’ trade union officer, responsible not to the membership, but to the standards of the employer and the state machine.

Under pressure from both the workers and the employers, the bureaucracies try all the time to become independent, to change their position from that of servant of the membership to that of master. To the extent that they succeed in this the unions become mainly organisations for controlling the workers and only secondarily organisations of the workers.

Even where this has already happened to a large extent, Conference rejects the idea that the unions can be bypassed or ignored or that breakaway unions should be promoted. The experience of the last sixty years shows that these views lead to a dangerous isolation of militants from the mass of their fellow workers and so to a strengthening of the bureaucracy. The struggle against the bureaucracy requires the needs a combination of rank and file activity and work in the union machine. Unofficial and official organisations must both be used.

In the longer term the struggle against the bureaucracy requires the development of a national rank and file organisation and a program of action which combines immediate and long term demands. Central to this program is the question of control by the membership.

Therefore Conference recognises the urgent need to campaign for rank and file control of the trade unions. We recognise the that no democratic constitution alone guarantees active democracy, that being dependent on the degree of participation by the membership at large. Where rank and file members draw up programmes of demands specific to their individual union, these should (a) be based on the principles outlined below and (b) be related to the immediate experience of trade unionists in struggle and not mere blueprints abstracted from the present level of class activity.

Officials

1. All officials should be elected and subject to constant recall.
2. All full-time officials should be paid the average wage in their industry.
3. Union policy-making bodies should be comprised of elected lay officials only.
4. Election addresses to be circulated unaltered for candidates for all elected positions in the union.
5. Any educational qualifications for union office should be abolished.
6. No member to be disqualified from holding office on political grounds.
7. Full minutes and voting records of policy making bodies should be circularised.
8. No political censorship of union journal.

National Conference

1. National delegate conferences should be held annually.
2. Standing Orders committees should annually comprise of elected lay-officials.
3. No branch block voting.
Appeals Court
1. Appeals Committees should be comprised of elected lay-officials.

Amalgamations

1. While in principle we support industrial unions and any amalgamations contributing to that end, the priority remains for maximum rank and file unity, for joint shop stewards committees, factory and combine wide.

Negotiations.

1. No secret negotiations.
2. Every stage of negotiations should be subject to rank and file ratifications at mass meetings.
3. Mass meetings should never be presented with package deals unless each part of the deal has been voted on separately beforehand.

Strikes.

1. All strikes in support of trade union principle, conditions or wages be made official.
2. Dispute benefit to be raised by levy of entire membership when necessary.

Closed Shop

1. Support of 100 per cent trade unionism and the right of trade unionists to enforce closed shops.
2. Opposition to check-off system.
3. Opposition to employer policed ‘agency shops’.
4. Support of the right for trade unionists to discipline fellow workers who flout democratic decisions.
5. Access to job waiting lists by shop stewards committees. Waiting lists to be on the basis, first applied first employed.

Shop Stewards

1. Opposition to any ‘managerial policing’ by shop stewards. No participation on management committees intended to keep shop stewards off the shop floor for long periods.
2. Shop stewards to hold regular report back meetings: insistence on allocated time for such meetings; especially where there is shift working.

Individual Rights

1. Right of members to criticise union policy
2. Right of members to meet unofficially and visit other branches.
3. Right of members to communicate with the press.
4. Right of members to write, circularise and/or sell political literature.
5. Right of appeal direct to Appeals court.
6. Right of all members, irrespective of sex or race, to pay equal contributions, to receive equal benefits and to have equal access to all union delegacies and offices.

*** *** *** *** *** ***

International Socialism Number 48 June/July 1971

2006-12-28T11:09:00.000-08:00

Headless Chickens.

All around me I hear calls from the most varied of people demanding that I attend this demonstration or that meeting. Each and every demonstration, campaign, meeting or even petition is vitally important and has the potential to change the world. Failure to attend even one such event proving my betrayal of the world revolution. Or so the headless chicken tendency would have it.

How some of these, no doubt worthy, causes further the aim of world revolution or even enable me to play some small role in pursuit of that goal is not explained. Indeed I often suspect that those who raise this criticism do so as they are unable to deal with the political criticisms raised from time to time of their own pet projects. There is nonetheless a serious question to be asked here as to what should individual comrades do? The only way I can answer this question is to look at the various tendencies on the left in Cardiff.

To begin I should say that politically it is my understanding that socialists need to take their propaganda into the working classes, in the first instance into the workplaces, and that their propaganda needs to be openly revolutionary. As I understand it we are passing through a period of recovery and recomposition for the working classes in this country. It follows that I am of the opinion that what can and must be built today is a revolutionary propaganda group and that it must be built in the workplaces and among the young people. As we are years away from mass struggles the idea that a new Mass Workers Party must be proclaimed now is plain wrong as is the idea that revolutionaries must participate in a populist party.

Of course there is a lot more to be said on the above and such a group cannot simply be proclaimed by one militant or even by a small handful of militants. It needs to come out of the workers own struggles both on the theoretical level and that of experience; the past history of the revolutionary movement cannot be ignored but must be assimilated and overcome. The low level of struggle means however that mindless activism and self proclamation must be excluded as valid methods for building anything but recruiting fronts for sects. The goal of even a small open thinking propaganda group that is not lost to the various traps which beset the groups is then not likely to be reached in the near future.

How then to contribute to that aim? One could maintain activity in one’s own workplace and/or trade union. Which work is mandatory in fact but unless backed by other militants elsewhere extremely hard to sustain and many comrades lack the opportunity to do such work. And if one is not a trades unionist then membership and involvement with a trades council is excluded as a way of generalising one’s politics. Or one could join one or other of the political groups that exist or failing that one or other of the many single issue campaigns. They all need and actively seek recruits so why not get involved?

Cardiff being a regional centre and a university city is blessed with a variety of campaigns and political groups so with the above in mind I intend to glance at a sampling of them. In my opinion most cities and towns in England and Wales will have a similar variety of campaigns and groups so much so my conclusions as to what an individual comrade might do in such circumstances would likely be identical in most such cities.

I’ll begin with the largest organisation on the left the Labour Party. Which I submit does not provide a meaningful site of activity for any socialist let alone a revolutionary and in Cardiff, as in so many places, it lacks any real activist base to which one could relate. It does however still have the passive allegiance of much of the working class in the city and of the workforce which is drawn from across south east Wales too. That the local trades council is not loyal to Labour only points up the fact that it consists of a tiny number of largely isolated militants, some members of the Socialist Party, and has no real influence in the workplaces or amongst the rank and file.
Moving on then to the Socialist Party and its youth group International Socialist Resistance together they are probably the most substantial grouping of socialists in the area. But all told I doubt they have much more than a score of members and their organised periphery, largely defined by membership of either their front group the Campaign for a New Workers Party or involvement in the semi-moribund CRISIS group, is tiny. They have little real influence and are, from my point of view a quite rightist tendency, no point joining them in my view even if I were permitted! More realistically the CNWP is their creature and any view dissenting from their own as to how it should function is not welcome.

As for the Socialist Workers Party it is a tiny shrunken rump, many older members having been relegated to National Member status and told to abandon activity. As for its creature Respect the populist Coalition, in Cardiff it seems to have died. Quite how or why one would orientate to the remaining dolts and naifs involved is beyond my comprehension. Similarly I cannot understand why anybody would seek out the three aged members of the Permanent Revolution network/group, although they are pleasant enough people in person, as harmless eccentrics often are. Or indeed the Social Forum talk-shop they have spent the last few years building only to see it dominated politically by hopeless liberals lacking even an activist agenda. It is in any case pretty much moribund.

Also moribund, word of the day, is the Peoples Autonomous Destination a project of some of the folks associated with the Cardiff Anarchist Network. PAD being a squat in which ‘art works’ were displayed and vegan sarnies consumed, or so I’m told as I tend to avoid such things given the habit of those involved not to bathe regularly. CAN however is perhaps the largest radical grouping in Cardiff these days and certainly the most visible. Although it doesn’t actually do anything as a group and is dominated by lifestyle type anakids despite its publication, entitled Banned! although it isn’t, featuring stories which touch on class. But any real class orientation would seem to be unthinkable for most of the group who are clearly more concerned with liberal issues like bike routes and macrobiotic pasties. Curiously one of the groups participants was described to me as a ‘union organiser’ which is true only if one can call an appointed trade union official an organiser.

CAN then does not provide an avenue for anybody seeking class politics, indeed its meetings are by and large only open to those accepting their ideology, given that typically they are only concerned with protesting injustices against ‘people’ in general and do not accept that the working classes are the real subject/object of the social revolution. For them the oppressed are to be woken from their slumbers by their providing an example to follow through direct action exploits. In practice then, like so many anarchists before them, they are simply more militant liberals.

Talking of liberals there are several single issue campaigns with branches in Cardiff. Most are the property of one or other left sect or another and most do very little. None of them would appear to have any interest in reaching out to the working classes. This is true of the Stop the War Campaign which has been led by the SWP from the beginning by virtue of their being first in the field and by making alliances with various individuals. This has kept the meetings of the group small and repelled new activists due to the meetings simply rubberstamping anything the London leadership suggests and being very dull indeed as a result. Curiously at one point a trade union officer was elected to the local steering committee but true to form the comrade elected did exactly nothing. Despite my harassing the comrade concerned, a member of the ill-named cpgb group, via e mails with suggestions as to activity directed towards the trades unions.
In addition to the STWC there are numerous other single issue campaigns most of which are very middle class, respectable and lacking in both activity and any interest in the working classes. Some admittedly do want donations from trade union bodies but other than that see nothing of interest in that sphere of life. Perhaps the two most interesting campaigns to have any activity here in the last decade are the Campaign for Climate Change and CRISIS. The latter being a campaign set up prior to the closure of the Cardiff Royal Infirmary some years ago to call for protection of the services provided by that hospital. Although briefly important, due in part to the work of the SP, it has had no real impact for years now but given that few of the services formerly provided by the CRI have been lost and new facilities have been built this should not be surprising. As for the CCC it is a national campaign with no discernable working class aspect to it and oriented on youthquake demonstrations. A rather aimless and pointless campaign if we are to be truthful.

As well as the above there are many other political groups and single issue campaigns existing in Cardiff but I an find no reason for involving myself with them other than episodically. In the first place few have any base or orientation towards the working classes and those that do tend to orientate not to the class but to trade union bureaucrats. Their political approach is one that is completely alien to me as it always means approaching the class through its existing leadership but the central problem we face today is that not only are our current leaders worse than useless the very forms of leadership current within the organised sections of the class are reactionary by virtue of their very nature.

More immediately problematic for active involvement with those campaign groups which temporarily flourish due to events in the real world they tend to lack any kind of democratic culture. Thus the approach of the SWP in the STWC was such that as far as the local branch was concerned what needed to be done was to simply follow the instructions and orders coming from London without question. This meant blocking political discussion other than on some small ill attended committee and such committees are very boring indeed tending to drive young activists away. As for the idea of doing work directed towards the unions and workplaces this was not to be countenanced and even when a trade union officer was elected, as I detailed above, nothing was done and nobody seemed to even care. Not that things were any better in the SP dominated CNWP meeting I attended with any opinions that dissented from those of the SP being howled down by members of that group with the result that the CNWP is no more than a cadaver.

One aspect of the problem in the political groups and in the single issue groups both is that they are both adversely affected by the very low level of the democratic culture in this society generally. Student unionism has become a very bad joke indeed mirroring parliamentary politics with its emptiness and irrelevance to daily life. Meanwhile trade union democracy is hollowed out as fewer and fewer bother to attend union branch meetings and shop stewards positions go uncontested left to whoever fancies the job. As for the major political parties they have serious problems even locating enough members to stand for local councils so emptied out have they become. All of which mean that elected representatives at all levels relate less and less to their constituencies and act towards them in a manner that echoes the hierarchical organisational forms that characterise capitalist society.

Yet for a class conscious workers’ movement, I am talking here of a movement not of the various institutions commonly referenced as such, to exist it must possess a vigorous democratic culture or new leaders and methods of struggle simply cannot come into being. In which case it is absurd to expect all but a tiny minority of those entering radical politics to understand the unique nature of the working class as the subject/object of social revolution. It is this minority and its willingness to orientate towards the workplaces and to serious master Marxist theory that is vital to any future revolutionary project.

However locating such a tiny minority cannot be done unless a revolutionary propaganda group can be brought into being in the next period. Something I freely confess I find unlikely in a country in which the existing far left groups seem intent on moving ever further away from Marxism in pursuit of goals quite alien to the working class goal of communism. At best in most towns and cities the opportunity to raise genuinely Marxian views in the various campaigns which momentarily flourish and then as quickly wither has been and will for the foreseeable future continue to be fleeting. There is then no good reason to prop up such campaigns based as they are on politics inimical to the communist goal.

What then can isolated individuals do? In truth very little for most of the time. Attempt to locate fellow thinkers and form discussion groups; redouble one’s personal efforts top conquer the Marxian method; work as best on can in those fields which are open despite the lack of any immediate breakthrough and engage in whatever other tasks one’s personal talents or opportunities open.

But most of all communists need to avoid the temptations of running around like a headless chicken. Although the chicken being a stupid bird has the excuse of not knowing it is already dead. A lesson more and more leftists will learn in the months and years to come as they realise they too are as good as dead. May they rest in peace.

2006-12-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

Dead Man Walking

Only a little while ago Dave Osler chose to inform the world that he was no longer a Trotskyist. That he still continued with the ludicrous idea that he ever was a Trotskyist came as a very minor surprise to a tiny few. Quite why he chose to spit on his political past in this way was a bit of a mystery too. But now he has revealed that he is 'returning' to the Labour Party.

I freely confess I find former comrade Osler's point of view quite disgustingly rank and opportunist lacking in any kind of principle whatsoever. Although his rationale for joining Labour does have considerable continuity with the bankrupt variety of post-Trotsky Trotskyism with which he was for a long time associated. In fact as he suggests it is an attempt to continue the very same failed politics that he has been arguing for this past decade or so that he borrowed from the disUnited Secretariat of the Fourth International.

Of course Dave did not find the disUnited Sectarians by chance he graduated to them by virtue of a shared lack of confidance in the revolutionary capacity of the working classes and a rejection of principled Marxism. But he did find them and that current did shape his ideas, and quite clearly still does to some considerable degree. This emerges from his advocacy of the building of parties of recomposition whatever that dubious term is meant to mean.

What most certainly can be found in what masquerades as the workers movement in 2006 are parties of decomposition. That is to say parties which once expressed, however poorly, the aim of constructing a new socialist society by reformist or revolutionary means but which have now decayed into hollowed out shells, emptied out of their former working class membership. Which Dave knows to be a major problem hence his desire for many years to build a new party in opposition to Labour the party of decomposition in this country.

What a party of recomposition is seems to be rather harder to grasp from a reading of the USFI's ideas on the subject. It seems that in different countries it can mean very different things but always means the demand that revolutionary socialists abandon the aim of building their own organisation openly and join another larger political formation based on a non-revolutionary program. In other words in a period of recovery such as the one we are passing through it means the building of a new party, in part by uniting the existing socialist groups, based on a reformist practice and for the revolutionaries concerned not to come forward with their full program as such is deemed inappropriate.

For our brave advocate of unity at all costs this strange idea, namely that revolutionaries should not be the best fighters for reforms but the best fighters for a reformist party, led to his advocacy of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party. Which might have been fine, although the expected prospoects for the SLP were never as Dave fantasised but hope as they say springs eternal, were it not for the idealisation which Dave and his comrades had treated Scargil to in the past. Indeed a grouping of Dave's former comrades in the USFI who joined the SLP were amongst the most noxious witchunters and anti-democratic bullies within that short lived parody of a workers' party. And all because they needed to protect the great leaders status in order to make the party attractive to workers a position the more conscience wracked Osler recoiled from but a position consistent with his own views on recomposition.

With the inevitable collapse of the SLP, albeit a collapse that was more grotesque and distasteful than even this blogger expected, our brave advocate of socialist unity learnt nothing and blithly rushed into the next unity project which presented itself, the Socialist Alliance (sic). If anything the illusions briefly built on the frail edifice that was the Socialist Alliance would seem to suggest that Dave has a capacity to hallucinatory delusions that can only be informed by prolonged use of serious drugs or an utterly banal failure to grasp reality at any level beyond that of the workday and its tasks.

Around this time too our hero resumed his affiliation with a far left fragment and for its short livetime would appear to have been a supporter of the Socialist Democracy grouplet led by one Phil Hearse, a well known functionary for the USFI, who for a brief moment entered the SP only to exit it but a short while later, another 'unity' manouvre one can but guess. Tellingly Dave chose to write a 'comedy' column for this insignificant publication entitled Bollinger Bolshevik although like most of the contents of the magazine it lacked not only real content but humour and bite too. And when some time later it disappeared nobody even noticed.

Suffice to say the very idea that the warring fragments of what is laughingly known as the revolutionary left should unite in a single body was and is a very bad joke indeed. The idea that they should then unite with some tiny fragments of the Labour Party on the basis of a rotten stitched together ragbag of a program even more ridiculous. Both of which propositions being based on sober thought through joined up thinking in comparison to the vision pushed by the Socialist Workers Party, when it belatedly joined the Socialist Alliance, that the body in question should and could become a magnet for disillusioned Labour activists. Which strategic vision led to the Socialist Party throwing a hissy fit and walking out of the Socialist Alliance when the SWP used its majority to push its ludicrous vision. A vision soon abandoned when reality, as was always going to happen, falsified the opportunist nonsense dreamt up by some demented hack at the behest of the SWP's leadership.

Picture poor Dave at this point with all his political hopes in tatters. Bereft of anything to recompose the poor boy must have been in a terrible state. But no worries even if the left in England had failed him at least the left in Scotland was following the route he had charted for them. Until its recent division into two rival 'parties' with almost identical programs that is. So picture poor Dave again, politically bereft with few hopes for any way forward, small wonder that in a moment of doubt and despair he began looking again towards the Labour Party perhaps?

Ironists will of course be aware that Dave had only shortly authored a useful, if not terribly original, book exposing the links of the Labour Party to big business showing how its roots as a party founded and linked to the trades unions was being eroded by the direct links of the Blairites to capitalism. Of course his little book languised on the shelves to some degree as none of the socialist groups publicised it or boosted it as they might have done given that it is completely in harmony with the views of the extra-Labour Party far left. That Daves book was a victim of petty sectarianism cannot be doubted and surely the way it was largely ignored might have warned him as to the sheer futility of socialist unity?

Small wonder indeed that the poor boy despaired of Trotskyism at this point. One almost feels for the poor fellow disappointed as he so clearly has been by the failures of the left to deliver on its promises. Almost but not quite given that his understanding of Trotskyism has always been faulty, as indeed it had to be given his schooling in the ranks of the disUnited Sectarians. The central defining feature of this tendency being its quest for substitutes for the working class which have led it onto many a centrist detour and have doomed entire layers of activists who have at one point or another joined its ranks only to succumb to disillusionment and eventual retirement from revolutionary politics.

It follows with an almost elegant logic that if one rejects the central role of the working class in the struggle for social revolution that various other social forces which appear at a given point in time to share a similar goal can be embraced. At bottom it is this confusion as to the goal of the revolutionary socialist movement, as well as any confusion as to agency, that betrays the trotskyist pretensions of the USFI and Dave Osler as being mere guff. For the good reason that the two most important social forces which they have in the past most popularly been seen as substitutes for a class conscious working class have both been deeply statist I refer of course to Stalinism and Social Democracy/Labourism.

But if the USFI was willing to look to substitutes for the working classes in various and varied forms, for example they looked to 'reform' Stalinism in the 1950's and ridiculously to Student Vanguards in the 1970's, Dave has managed to produce some absurd interpretations of what Trotskyism was all by himself. Thus in his article disavowing Trotskyism he declares that in order to be a Trotskyist one must adhere to the conjunctural positions developed by Trotsky in both the 1920's and 1930's. Quite how anybody, let alone Trotsky himself, could hold positions which were counter-posed and specific to a given time is not expalined, nor can it be. But if such a banal contradiction is typical of our friends lack of understanding of what Trotskyism was his failure to discuss, let alone refute, Trotskyisms revolutionary opposition at all times, not simply conjunctural, to both capitalism in its imperialist stage of development and to Stalinism is not even touched upon! But one cannot honestly disavow what one never avowed or even understood.

Even before his final disavowal of Trotskyism former comrade Osler was clearly stepping away from an internationalist vision of socialism and had made clear his willingness to support the intervention of imperialist forces in such countries as Sierra Leone and Haiti. A position which places only a milimetre to the left of the turncoats who signed the Euston Manifesto. Indeed one cannot but suspect that if Dave were a little more red blooded and less ashamed of his renegacy he too would have signed that traitors charter. Just as one gets a similar feeling from his new found friends in the quasi-Shachtmanite Alliance for Workers Liberty who are also increasingly clustered in the ranks of the Labour Party.

What then remained of former comrade Oslers socialist vision, indeed of his Marxism, that impelled him to rejoin the Labour Party? (In passing it must be noted that although Dave is technically speaking rejoining Labour in fact his earlier sojourn in the ranks of that party was as an entrist and not as a loyal member of that party as such). Nothing really as he has made clear that he disavows any attempt to recruit to any new project within the party or to fight for socialist policies at all. Indeed his only real motivation, other perhaps than personal ambition, would appear to be his despair that all the socialist unity and recomposition projects have been tried and failed and that one can do no better than taking cover within the Labour Party.

Such an understanding, sane and sensible though it is at least in comparison to the absurdist projects of the various sects, born of political despair as it is condemns the man adopting it to the status of dead man walking zombie like into an open grave. It is the end result of a politics which long ago rejected the conception, central to Marxism, that the working classes are the subject/object of the social revolution and if Marxists do not relate to that class then they are breaking with the social revolution itself.

2006-12-07T17:57:00.000-08:00

Electoral Slates and Joint Slates

by Duncan Hallas

Socialist Workers Party Bulletin No 3 May 1977

Introduction by neprimerimye

The article is also extremely funny when read with the benefit of hndsight as it is replete with considerable ironies. For example in reference to the unity mongers of the International Maggot Group (IMG) Hallas talks of them placing the emphasis of their politics on many varied social groups but not on the working class to whch they paid lip service as supposed marxists. In particular Hallas subjects the IMG to some ridicule with regard to its front groups in Scotland and in Birmingham amongst the Asian population. Given that the SWP of today has adopted the IMG's position on Scotland, worse it tails Scottish nationalism in the form of Tommy Sheridans personal project 'Solidarity', and panders to a communalism more reactionary than that of the Asian Socialist League one can only wonder what the author would have to say today if hisyounger self were confronted with such a blatant political degeneration.

*** *** ***

Some comrades have asked if we should reconsider our attitude towards an electoral pact with other organisations on the revolutionary left.

How does this apply to parliamentary etc. elections?

Revolutionary intervention in parliamentary elections at present is essentially a propaganda operation, a means of contacting people and involving them in some of our activities and of recruiting.

We judge our success (or failure) in a contest by members recruited, contacts made, SW readers gained and so on and not mainly by votes gained.

Of course, it is very pleasing if we get a better than expected vote, a little disappointing if we get a lower than expected vote. But it is not the main thing. We are not parliamentary roaders.

But this will always be secondary to building the party in the workplaces, to fighting for leadership in the day to day struggles of working people and inside the unions.

Our aim in contesting parliamentary elections is to build the SWP. We do not put the emphasis on getting the biggest possible vote for the 'far-left'.

Protest votes, and that is what is being spoken of, are not without significance, but they are incomparably less important than building the party.

Where does this leave us with respect to the IMG? Since many of our members do not come into contact with this organisation, it may be useful to say a little about it.

The IMG regards itself as a Trotskyist organisation and is affiliated to the biggest of the various bodies claiming to be 'the Fourth International'. It claims top have 680 members. Some of these - I do not know what proportion - operate inside the Labour Party as 'entrists'.

Similarly, a Socialist Students Alliance has been set up (on much the same basis) as a rival to NOISS, and the IMG paper tells us "the SSA has now replaced NOISS as the major force after the Broad Left", a claim as hollow as those made for other 'fronts' the IMG has sponsored over the years.

The SSA ran its own slate against NOISS (as well as the Broad Left and the Tories) at the recent NUS conference.

For weeks on end, the IMG paper carried attacks from all and sundry on the 'bureaucratic', 'sectarian' and of course, politically hopeless RTW leadership, complete with atrocity stories.
Red Weekly sees this sport of thing as unimportant. Nearly every issue contains attacks on the SWP (three per issue is the norm) alongside calls for 'unity'! Compare the absence of attacks on the IMG in Socialist Worker.

In spite of our forbearance, they continually denounce the SWP as 'sectarian'!

Now we learn that the IMG is going to launch a new weekly paper called Socialist Challenge which will also serve its various front organisations - these now include a Scottish Socialist League and an Asian Socialist League (in Birmingham) as well as the various Alliances and the IMG members in the Labour Party. It will, so Red Weekly tells us, "be a non-sectarian polemical paper". There are no prizes for guessing who most of the polemics will be aimed at!

Hiding your politics, sailing under false colours, never builds in the long run.

The 'electoral unity' proposals have to be seen against this background.

What the IMG has in mind is not a practical arrangement that seeks to avoid, or at any rate minimize, the Stechford type situation of two far-left candidates. What they are after is, as they admit, a 'joint-slate', a common platform and a united campaign - and not only an electoral one.
An article in Red Weekly on the French municipal election agreement between far-left groups puts the line very clearly: "while Lutte Ouvriere initially saw the agreement as requiring only joint electoral work, the LCR (the French IMG) correctly insisted on the need for a national joint platform...

Our comrades also argued for joint activity to extend beyond the electoral arena, to build the implantation of the revolutionary organisations".

Now this is nonsense. Either there is basic agreement about building the party - in which case the organisations ought to unite in a single party - or there is not, in which case they cannot 'build the implantation'. How can we build jointly with the IMG when, wherever they have the strength, they build blocs against us with forces to the right of us? to repeat, we are out to build the revolutionary arty, not to maximise the vote by alliances Which hinder building.

In the past, the IMG has put the emphasis on work everywhere except in the working class, but in the last few years it has changed its line and says it agrees with us on this.

Unfortunately, it has moved well to the right at the same time and thinks in terms of blocs with various 'independents' who have official positions, rather than building rank and file movements.
Another problem is that the IMG is a coalition of permanent factions (they call them tendencies), a state of affairs they regard as positively desirable, and are not likely to accept democratic-centralism as we understand it. And, of course, they want to stay affiliated to their 'Fourth International'.

Understanding, however, is not the same thing as weakness and it would be both weak and extremely foolish to give countenance to these 'unity manoeuvres.'

This was written, in part, to defend the IMG's rejection of the IS proposal to unite the to organisations into a single party which was our policy in 1968 and 1969. In those days, they believed that they could build their organisation faster and better than ours could be built. then we would unite when they had the majority.

In the event, we built and they did not - they are little stronger now than they were then. One reason is that we turned our backs on sectarian bickering and they did not.

This was directed against various 'independents' and 'New Lefts' who wanted a bloc rather than a party.

2006-11-28T04:13:00.000-08:00

Revolutionary History AGM 2006

The scene the function room of an anonymous nondescript north London pub, the purpose of the meeting I was attending the AGM of Revolutionary History journal. Arriving after the meeting had begun I took a seat at the back of the not quite full room and studied my fellow attendees. What first struck me was the continuity of purpose which was represented in that room and I was reminded of the possibility that the rather frayed thread in question is near to breaking point.

The continuity of the thread in question, that is to say the struggle for the social revolution and workers’ power, was most in evidence at the front of the room where Mildred Gordon, once a Labour Party MP, and George and Sheila Leslie, were to be found all three having been youthful members of the Revolutionary Communist Party back in the 1940’s. Near by sat Esther Leslie, the daughter of the aforementioned Leslies and one of the few intellectuals with anything to say who can be found in the ranks of the 'revolutionary left' today, in her case the Socialist Workers Party. Bob Archer the son of another old time Trotskyist, the late John Archer, was to be found a few seats away he too remains a member of a far left group although it is so minuscule I forget its name.

As for the rest of the audience it consisted of former and current members of the various Trotskyist groups and ranged in age from retirement age to the relatively youthful elements only just in their forties. Although for one brief moment a comrade only just in his twenties was present it must be said. Apart from being ancient the audience, with the exception of those already mentioned, was also uniformly male, grey of hair and lacking in any fashion sense. But to be fair is it wise to expect socialists for whom the history of a small temporarily defeated movement is a passion to be other than greybeards? Well, yes it is, but more of that later.

The first section of the meeting consisted of business items and was, as is often the case with such things, rather dull but quite important. Opening the meeting Ted Crawford noted that the journal had signed a distribution deal with Merlin http://www.merlinpress.co.uk/acatalog/index.html which should increase sales of both the current and back issues. It may be of interest to many that said company have recently published Broue’s monumental volume on the German Revolution and will be reprinting the ABC of Communism by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in the spring. Given that the finances of the journal are healthy, if not vigorous, this cannot but be good news for students of the past of the revolutionary movement. Also noted was the refurbishment of the journals web http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/ site which features a wide range of materials some of which has not appeared in print. More controversially a reorganisation of the journals editorial board was also mooted by the core of the active London based members of the board.

Originally set up by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, following their jointly writing a two volume history of British Trotskyism from its beginnings to the dissolution of the RCP in the late forties, the object of the journal was clearly oriented on making available rare texts from the international Trotskyist movement and supporting them with historical essays placing them in context. Such a remit ensured that the early editorial board consisted of a levy of comrades drawn from the ranks of those comrades outside the groups for various reasons leavened by informal representatives of the then current groups identifying with the Bolshevik Leninist legacy. As time passed this was modified by the addition of other comrades who did not always identify with the Trotskyist tradition and, somewhat inevitable this, the Spartacists threw a wobbly and walked away from the journal. More recently, particularly since the death of Al Richardson, small groups of comrades have worked collectively to bring together individual issues.

The main thing was that the journal worked and came out regularly with an ever widening range of material and interests but was always informed by its starting point of recording and documenting the history of the revolutionary communist movement. But unless more comrades come forward to participate in the work of the journal, particularly on the technical side of things, there is a threat that the on going project of uncovering the true history of the revolutionary movement and making it available to the radical public will be endangered given the inevitable aging process. Should comrades be interested in helping the journal, particularly in relation to taking charge of important technical work such as layout and translation, they ought not hesitate contacting the journal directly or via this blog.

The second part of the meeting was devoted to a talk by Mike Jones, who has done much to make known the record and views of the Brandler-Thalheimer tendency in this country, on Pierre Broue and the German Revolution. An extended discussion of the talk would be superfluous given that it duplicated Mike’s illuminating review of Broue’s monumental work which can be found in the current issue of Revolutionary History. What must be said however is that the discussion from the floor, although a little unfocussed, was of a high standard and would have been of considerable benefit to many young comrades only a few years in the revolutionary movement. And yet with only a single solitary exception no such comrades were present a result of the group culture that prefers not to expose their more youthful members to the possibility of being corrupted by non-orthodox opinions. Such attitudes will and are condemning the groups to irrelevance and a decline into an intellectual stupor that makes the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages look progressive by comparison.

2006-11-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

Anarcho-Bureaucratism

Why Anarchists Oppose Workers' Democracy Pt 37.

While attending a performance of much famed Japanese freakout band Acid Mothers Temple I fell into conversation with a former SWP member who has, due to the degeneration of that centrist-populist sect, become an anarchist. After chatting about mutual friends, meaning former friends now enemies, I asked my chum whether he was still active in his union. His reply was illuminating.

One element of my friends critique, if we may give such a grandiose label to misgivings based on the grotesque internal regime of the SWP (humourously known as 'Democratic Centralism'), of Marxism is a commitment to direct action as being somehow more revolutionary. Such a view is, as it always has been, opposed to Workers' Democracy in the name of the spontaneous forms revolt must take. In practice the actions of small self appointed groups are more valid, how irrelevant, than the more cautious halting movement of the masses. And if the masses will not follow the self appointed revolutionaries then so much the worse for them the fools!

Yet at the same time my friend, like most anarchists today, wishes to be seen to be more democratic, not less, than is the case with both offical party politics and the bureaucratised union machines. That said my friend is not a syndicalist, if indeed he is aware of syndicalism as an ideological current, still less a Wobbly, or an advocate of a new Rank and File or Minority Movement in the unions and workplaces. His lack of knowledge of such ideas is as much the fault of the SWP, as it is of the anarchist movement for failing to provide him with adequate knowledge of the history of the workers movement.

But whatever my old friend is, he is a sincere enemy of the boss class and dedicated trades unionist. He knows full well that the trade union bureaucracy is a barrier to class struggle, that they collude with the bosses to oppose strike action, and use the law as an excuse not to fight for workers rights. Indeed on a good day he is quite capable of correctly describing the trade union bureaucracy as a bureaucratic caste, sat atop the workers movement with interests of its own, which stand in contradiction to those of the class as a whole. Crucially he is aware that one reason for this is the undemocratic nature of the unions today.

It came then as a small surprise to be told that he has accepted a position as an appointed trade union official. For the moment it is only part, two days a week, but he hopes to gain a fulltime position soon. He has his misgivings of course and seemed uneasy when asked if he had been elected to the post he occupies. But a wage is a wage and working for the union is better than working for the state mending the highways. Far more interesting too and one can do some good, or so we are told by every aspiring reformist on the make.

But is it not a contradiction being an anarchist and an appointed trade union offical I asked. My friends reply was a long time coming and not terribly easy to hear as he muttered and looked around for a way to evade the question. But after a while I did make out an answer and learned that there was no contradiction as being an anarchist and being a trade union offical were both about getting things done. No more was said and much I felt was left unsaid.

On the way home, after a most excellent performance, I wondered what my friend had meant by his enigmatic remarks. After giving the subject some though I realised that both his local anarchist group and the trade union bureaucrats act free of and in isolation from the workers or people they claim to act on behalf of. Neither the anarchists with their fetish on direct action, always concieved as a more noisy shouty demonstration and not as workers action at the point of production, and the trade union bureaucrat who typically 'represents' his members, while denying them the opportunity to speak for themselves, being able to concieve of workers acting self consciously in pursuit of their common interests as a social revolutionary class.

Why should they when they oppose at every step each movement of the class itself as being too militant or not militant enough. For the bureaucrat the class must be represented and the class organisation, the union structures from which they derive their generous wages, the machine by which this aim is satisfied. What can never be allowed to happen is for class organisations to emerge in the workplaces based on the radical democracy of a conscious working class for this is anathema to the bureaucrat. Meanwhile the anarchists are quite happy on their small shouty demonstrations denouncing whatever the cause is this week. Denunciations of the workers and others for not joining their cause being an optional extra as it were. Happy just as long as there is no need for democratic structures, for democracy is anathema to the anarchists.

And for my friend there is no contradiction as he cannot in truth concieve of the trade unions ever taking militant action. As a result of which he can see no role for the workers as such in struggling against bourgeois society except as individuals. Lacking any understanding of the collective strength of the workers at the point of production he therefore rejects the class as the instrument of its own liberation and can then easily ignore the elementary need for democracy within the workers movement. Having sold his soul to the bureaucracy he can salve it by calling for anarchy on the weekends. A sad fate I thought for somebody who might once have become a revolutionist and ironic too as he has drifted towards both anarchism and union reformism, both in essence undemocratic, as a result of his objections to the lack of democracy within the SWP.

2006-11-09T13:43:00.000-08:00

The purpose of this blog is simply to post the odd comment concerning whatever takes my fancy at any given moment. More than likely the subjects addressed will be the class struggle, the far left and music that you're too square to like. In addition to which from time to time I shall post various lost texts from the archives of revolutionary communism. As for the symbol, it comes from the heroic Vietnamese Bolshevik Leninists who were murdered by Stalinist counter revolution in 1945, it represents the Fourth International which is yet to be founded, but is the last chance of achieving a truly human society. Comments will not be censored, however critical they might be, unless they are deemed pointlessly abusive, racist, sexist, etc. Otherwise say what you will and death to all fake lefts and their PC fetish.