Viser opslag med etiketten Trots. Vis alle opslag
Viser opslag med etiketten Trots. Vis alle opslag
fredag den 14. august 2009
Did Trotsky Point the Way to Socialism?
The debate between the Socialist Party (represented by Adam Buick) and Hillel Ticktin has been uploaded to YouTube for your viewing pleasure.
søndag den 21. september 2008
Militant Dishonesty
After the Labour Party, which for years was infiltrated by Trotskyists pretending to be bonafide members, we in the Socialist Party are the latest victims of Trotskyist dishonesty.
One of the Trotskyists groups, Militant, has decided to call itself "Socialist Party" and to put up candidates for elections under this name, despite the fact that we have been using this name for over 90 years.
This is the name we used on the ballot paper at the last general election (when Militant was campaigning for the laughable objective of "Labour to Power on a Socialist Programme!"), in the 1994 European elections, and in the Littleborough and Saddleworth parliamentary by-election in 1995 as well as in various local council elections and a council by-election in Lambeth last year. It is also the name under which we will be standing 5 candidates (in Glasgow, London, Jarrow, Easington and Livingston) in this year's general election.
We contest Militant's right to use this name, on two grounds. First, it is the name we use and one political group cannot simply come along and take the name used by another, long-standing and well-established, political party. This is an elementary democratic principle. To work properly, political democracy depends on people being able to make an informed choice, one condition of which is that different political organisations should be distinguished by separate names. Nobody is likely to confuse our policies and those of a Trotskyist organisation, but when a Trotskyist organisation uses the same name as us there is bound to be some confusion, so undermining the democratic process (not that Trotskyists, as Leninists, will be concerned about that).
Secondly of course, Trotskyists aren't socialists anyway. But who are Militant and where did they come from?
Who are Militant?
In the 1940s three Trotskyists arrived in Britain: Tony Cliff (fromPalestine), Ted Grant(from South Africa) and Gerry Healy (from Ireland). Each was destined to become the guru of one of the three main Trotskyist sects that were to emerge in Britain.
For a while all three worked together as members of the same organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which existed for a few years after the War as an independent Trotskyist party. Then they went their separate ways, except in so far as all three of them joined the Labour Party.
Cliff, who had come to accept the view that Russia was state capitalist, started a paper that later become Intertional Socialism, and a group that is now the SWP. Healy and Grant stuck with the Trotskyist dogma that Russia, even under Stalin, was a "Workers' State" albeit a "degenerate" one, but they fell out over some obscure question of "tactics". Healy started a group which eventually became the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party. Grant ran a paper called Socialist Fight which was forever praising the supposed achievements of Russia's "planned economy" but still managed to attract a following amongst young Labourites on Merseyside. It later changed its name to Militant.
Until 1968 all three groups pursued the Trotskyist tactic of boring from within the Labour Party known as "entryism". By far the most successful was Healy who managed to capture the Labour Party's youth section, the Young Socialists, and their paper Keep Left.
After 1968, and the students' revolt and general strike in France which convinced them that they no longer needed the Labour Party as an intermediary to "make contact with the working class", both Healy and Cliff withdrew their followers from the Labour Party and eventually set up their own parties and put up candidates against Labour (Cliff only briefly, Healy with money from Colonel Gaddafi).
Grant, however, decided to hang on inside the Labour Party where he now had a virtual monopoly of the Trotskyist franchise. In one sense this was a shrewd move and in the '80s he was to be even more successful in infiltrating Labour than Healy had been in the '60s.
Grant's group, ostensibly just another pro-Labour paper like Tribune but in reality an undercover vanguard party named the Revolutionary Socialist League organised on strict Bolshevik lines, virtually captured Liverpool Labour Party (Derek Hatton has been their best-known member) and managed to get two of their members, Terry Fields and Dave Nellist, elected as Labour MPs. From the mid-80s the Labour machine counter-attacked. Grant and his followers were booted out of the Labour Party and Fields andNellist were de-selected.
Militant was now on its own, in what it had up till then regarded as the political wilderness. What to do? Was political life possible outside the Labour Party? Grant himself didn't think so and was for carrying on with "entryism" and trying to get back into the Labour Party clandestinely. Most of the other leaders regarded this as pointless; they were outside the Labour Party and would have to make the best of a bad job by acting as an independent organisation even if still telling people to vote Labour.
Grant was eventually expelled at the beginning of 1992 and yet another Trotskyist sect was bom. Militant changed its (public) name from Militant to Militant Labour. The tactic was adopted of putting up candidates against Labour at local council elections and by-elections, with some success in that one or two were elected councillors, in Glasgow and Liverpool.
When Scargill left the Labour Party last year and set up his "Socialist Labour Party", to an outsider it might have seemed obvious that Militant Labour and the Scargill Labour Party should join together — after all, both of them had the same policy, militant Labourism — but this was to overlook the fact that Scargill was a Stalinist who was determined that his party should not be infiltrated and perhaps taken over by some Trotskyist group (not that this has prevented some of the lesser Trotskyist sects having a go).
Talks between Scargill and Militant did take place but broke down, so Militant decided to set up a rival Old Labour party of its own. But what name to call it? Apparently, there were three options, Militant Labour Party, Militant Socialist Party and Socialist Party.
The name "Socialist Party" of course wasn't free as the leaders of Militant were well aware. Being part of it themselves, they are not ignorant of the minority political scene in Britain and have seen us selling the Socialist Standard ("journal of the Socialist Party") at the same demonstrations and on the same street corners as they sell Militant. Their leaders have been aware of our existence since their foundation and we have engaged them in formal debate and long intervened at their meetings in opposition.
This, however, did not stop Militant's leadership recommending "Socialist Parry" as the preferred option to a special conference held at the end of last November. According to the report in Militant (6 December), there was some opposition. Although 71.4 percent of delegates voted for, 24.8 percent voted for "Militant Socialist Party" and 3 percent for "Militant Labour".
So, an element of confusion has been introduced onto the British political scene: there are now two organisations calling themselves Socialist Party and two organisations putting up candidates at elections under this name. This is entirely the fault of a dishonest and cynical move by Militant to try to hijack the name used by an already-existing political organisation.
Naturally, we will oppose this move in every way we can but we are obliged to issue a warning to our sympathisers and others who know us: look twice before buying any pamphlet bearing the name "Socialist Party"; if you find it praising pre-Yeltsin Russia's "planned economy" or advocating fantastic reforms of capitalism then (obviously) it is not published by us but will be the usual Trotskyist nonsense. If you go to a meeting advertised as by the "Socialist Party" and the speaker advocates a "£6 minimum wage" or "Nationalise the Top 200 Monopolies" or that "the TUC call a General Strike Now" you will know you have been misled; stand up and say that the speaker is a fraud for pretending to be speaking on behalf of the Socialist Party.
Labourism with knobs on
But quite apart from the dishonesty of trying to steal our name, Militant does not stand for socialism It stands for state capitalism as its long-term aim while campaigning in the present for mostly impracticable reforms of capitalism.
There is a twisted logic to their campaigning for impracticable reforms. As followers of Lenin, Trotskyists hold that workers are incapable of directly understanding socialist ideas; at most, they can only acquire a "trade union consciousness" which reflects itself on the political field as support for reformist, Labour Party-type politics. In these circumstances to campaign directly for socialism (as we in the real Socialist Party do) would be to cast pearls before swine, mere "abstract propagandism". Instead, what a "vanguard party" must do is to try to use this workers' reformist discontent as a battering ram to overthrow the government and seize power for themselves as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done in Russia in November 1917.
Trotsky recommended that this be done by offering workers reforms (called "transitional demands") which the vanguard party knows perfectly well can't be obtained under capitalism, in the expectation that when these reforms are not granted the workers will turn against the government and support a Trotskyist coup d'etat.
This of course is pure science-fiction politics that is only likely to come true on the planet Zanussi but (fortunately) not on planet Earth. Imagine what a Trotskyist dictatorship would be like; not too difierent from a Stalinist one, we would suppose.
In the context of the electoralist tactic that Militant has now adopted, "transitional demands" translate as extravagant election promises of reforms to be achieved under capitalism, bait offered to the mass of worker-electors who are still perceived of as not being able to move beyond a reformist, Labourist consciousness.
At election times, Militant Labour appears as a super-reformist party, promising the same sort of reforms as Labour only bigger and better ones. Thus, if Labour promises a minimum wage of £3 an hour, Militant Labour promises one of £6. If Labour promises to increase spending on education and the health service by 10 percent, Militant Labour promises to increase it by 50 percent. If Labour promises the highest achievable level of employment, Militant promises full employment, and so on. In other words, there is no attempt to combat reformist illusions within the working class (the illusion that capitalism can be reformed to work in their interest); just the opposite in fact, such illusions are encouraged and magnified.
Militant, by accommodating itself to this attitude instead of campaigning to change it, is encouraging workers to believe that their problems can be solved within capitalism if only those they elect as local councillors and MPs were more demanding and more determined.
It is in fact on this basis that Militant's local councillors have been elected: as militant Labourists, as people who some traditional Labour voters feel will sincerely fight for the reforms that New Labour under Blair has abandoned. "Militant Labour", the name under which they were elected, was an entirely accurate description as what those who elected them wanted was someone to fight in a more militant way for Labour's traditional aims.
Militant's Ideal World
Militant would deny this charge of encouraging reformism — of in fact being militant reformists — by pointing out that they do say that capitalism can never work in the workers' interests. This is so, but by "capitalism" they only mean competitive, private enterprise capitalism, to which their alternative is planned, state-run capitalism not socialism.
Last year Militant (22 March) carried an article headed "Fighting for our ideal world" which ended: "Militant Labour demands:
• An end to slave labour schemes;
• £6 per hour minimum wage;
• The right to join a recognised trade union"
Hardly an inspiring ideal (and this was in an article aimed at young people!). Normally, it is true, Militant's "ideal" is not quite as crass as this but the principle is the same. In 1995, at the time the Labour Party was preparing to ditch Clause 4, Militant brought out a pamphlet called What is Socialism? in which they declared:
This ideal world of higher wages and affordable prices is to be achieved by nationalising all "the major companies and financial institutions".
Such wholesale nationalisation would not be socialism which is based on the common (as opposed to state) ownership and democratic control of productive resources, with goods and services being produced and distributed directly to satisfy people's needs with the disappearance of wages, prices, pensions, banks, money and all the other products of a buying-and-selling society such as capitalism.
Militant's "ideal society" turns out to be a state capitalism in which a government, supposedly ruling on behalf of the working class (but in reality controlled by and for the benefit of the leaders of the vanguard party), tries to plan the wages -profits-money system and make it work in the interest of all.
They give Cuba, and previously Russia, as an example of the sort of "planned", "non-capitalist" economy they have in mind ("Can Cuba Survive?",Militant, 22 March 1996), not as a perfect example but as a sufficiently successful example to back up their claim that a nationalised, planned economy of the kind they propose can work. But both Cuba and pre-Yeltsin Russia had state-capitalist, not non-capitalist, economies. Neither the Russian nor the Cuban revolution "overthrew capitalism", as Militant claims. What they did was to change the personnel of the privileged class that was to preside over the accumulation of capital in these countries, from private capitalists and outside imperialists to a Party elite of state bureaucrats. That Militant see the economic system in Cuba and what used to exist in Russia as a model for what should replace capitalism confirms that they too stand for state capitalism.
But state capitalism is no more in the interest of the working class than is private capitalism. It still retains the wages system, under which people have to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer to get the money to buy the things they need to live. But where the wages system exists so does economic exploitation, since workers are always paid as wages less than the value of the work they do; the rest (Marx called it surplus value) is creamed off by their employers, whether a private individual, a company or a state enterprise, and redistributed as the privileged income of shareholders and/or state bureaucrats.
The Trotskyist proposal to nationalise all major industries and financial institutions and turn us all into state employees does not end the wages system; it merely changes who employs us (where, that is, we are not already government employees of one sort or another) and changes those who live off our work from private shareholders to state bureaucrats.
So Trotskyists like Militant are not even on the same wavelength as Socialists. It is not a question of us and them having the same aim but a different method of getting there — us, democratic political action by a democratically-organised and consciously socialist majority; them, a minority-led insurrection without majority socialist understanding. Their aim is quite different from ours. We want socialism and the abolition of the wages system; they want state capitalism with all of us being paid by the state.
In other words, even if we had some other name such as a World Socialist Party they would still have no justification for calling themselves "Socialist Party". If they had been honest (but that's science-fiction politics again) they would have changed their name to SCP or State Capitalist Party or, if that was felt to be too explicit, simply to "Trotskyist Party".
ADAM BUICK. Socialist Standard, February 1997
One of the Trotskyists groups, Militant, has decided to call itself "Socialist Party" and to put up candidates for elections under this name, despite the fact that we have been using this name for over 90 years.
This is the name we used on the ballot paper at the last general election (when Militant was campaigning for the laughable objective of "Labour to Power on a Socialist Programme!"), in the 1994 European elections, and in the Littleborough and Saddleworth parliamentary by-election in 1995 as well as in various local council elections and a council by-election in Lambeth last year. It is also the name under which we will be standing 5 candidates (in Glasgow, London, Jarrow, Easington and Livingston) in this year's general election.
We contest Militant's right to use this name, on two grounds. First, it is the name we use and one political group cannot simply come along and take the name used by another, long-standing and well-established, political party. This is an elementary democratic principle. To work properly, political democracy depends on people being able to make an informed choice, one condition of which is that different political organisations should be distinguished by separate names. Nobody is likely to confuse our policies and those of a Trotskyist organisation, but when a Trotskyist organisation uses the same name as us there is bound to be some confusion, so undermining the democratic process (not that Trotskyists, as Leninists, will be concerned about that).
Secondly of course, Trotskyists aren't socialists anyway. But who are Militant and where did they come from?
Who are Militant?
In the 1940s three Trotskyists arrived in Britain: Tony Cliff (fromPalestine), Ted Grant(from South Africa) and Gerry Healy (from Ireland). Each was destined to become the guru of one of the three main Trotskyist sects that were to emerge in Britain.
For a while all three worked together as members of the same organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which existed for a few years after the War as an independent Trotskyist party. Then they went their separate ways, except in so far as all three of them joined the Labour Party.
Cliff, who had come to accept the view that Russia was state capitalist, started a paper that later become Intertional Socialism, and a group that is now the SWP. Healy and Grant stuck with the Trotskyist dogma that Russia, even under Stalin, was a "Workers' State" albeit a "degenerate" one, but they fell out over some obscure question of "tactics". Healy started a group which eventually became the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party. Grant ran a paper called Socialist Fight which was forever praising the supposed achievements of Russia's "planned economy" but still managed to attract a following amongst young Labourites on Merseyside. It later changed its name to Militant.
Until 1968 all three groups pursued the Trotskyist tactic of boring from within the Labour Party known as "entryism". By far the most successful was Healy who managed to capture the Labour Party's youth section, the Young Socialists, and their paper Keep Left.
After 1968, and the students' revolt and general strike in France which convinced them that they no longer needed the Labour Party as an intermediary to "make contact with the working class", both Healy and Cliff withdrew their followers from the Labour Party and eventually set up their own parties and put up candidates against Labour (Cliff only briefly, Healy with money from Colonel Gaddafi).
Grant, however, decided to hang on inside the Labour Party where he now had a virtual monopoly of the Trotskyist franchise. In one sense this was a shrewd move and in the '80s he was to be even more successful in infiltrating Labour than Healy had been in the '60s.
Grant's group, ostensibly just another pro-Labour paper like Tribune but in reality an undercover vanguard party named the Revolutionary Socialist League organised on strict Bolshevik lines, virtually captured Liverpool Labour Party (Derek Hatton has been their best-known member) and managed to get two of their members, Terry Fields and Dave Nellist, elected as Labour MPs. From the mid-80s the Labour machine counter-attacked. Grant and his followers were booted out of the Labour Party and Fields andNellist were de-selected.
Militant was now on its own, in what it had up till then regarded as the political wilderness. What to do? Was political life possible outside the Labour Party? Grant himself didn't think so and was for carrying on with "entryism" and trying to get back into the Labour Party clandestinely. Most of the other leaders regarded this as pointless; they were outside the Labour Party and would have to make the best of a bad job by acting as an independent organisation even if still telling people to vote Labour.
Grant was eventually expelled at the beginning of 1992 and yet another Trotskyist sect was bom. Militant changed its (public) name from Militant to Militant Labour. The tactic was adopted of putting up candidates against Labour at local council elections and by-elections, with some success in that one or two were elected councillors, in Glasgow and Liverpool.
When Scargill left the Labour Party last year and set up his "Socialist Labour Party", to an outsider it might have seemed obvious that Militant Labour and the Scargill Labour Party should join together — after all, both of them had the same policy, militant Labourism — but this was to overlook the fact that Scargill was a Stalinist who was determined that his party should not be infiltrated and perhaps taken over by some Trotskyist group (not that this has prevented some of the lesser Trotskyist sects having a go).
Talks between Scargill and Militant did take place but broke down, so Militant decided to set up a rival Old Labour party of its own. But what name to call it? Apparently, there were three options, Militant Labour Party, Militant Socialist Party and Socialist Party.
The name "Socialist Party" of course wasn't free as the leaders of Militant were well aware. Being part of it themselves, they are not ignorant of the minority political scene in Britain and have seen us selling the Socialist Standard ("journal of the Socialist Party") at the same demonstrations and on the same street corners as they sell Militant. Their leaders have been aware of our existence since their foundation and we have engaged them in formal debate and long intervened at their meetings in opposition.
This, however, did not stop Militant's leadership recommending "Socialist Parry" as the preferred option to a special conference held at the end of last November. According to the report in Militant (6 December), there was some opposition. Although 71.4 percent of delegates voted for, 24.8 percent voted for "Militant Socialist Party" and 3 percent for "Militant Labour".
So, an element of confusion has been introduced onto the British political scene: there are now two organisations calling themselves Socialist Party and two organisations putting up candidates at elections under this name. This is entirely the fault of a dishonest and cynical move by Militant to try to hijack the name used by an already-existing political organisation.
Naturally, we will oppose this move in every way we can but we are obliged to issue a warning to our sympathisers and others who know us: look twice before buying any pamphlet bearing the name "Socialist Party"; if you find it praising pre-Yeltsin Russia's "planned economy" or advocating fantastic reforms of capitalism then (obviously) it is not published by us but will be the usual Trotskyist nonsense. If you go to a meeting advertised as by the "Socialist Party" and the speaker advocates a "£6 minimum wage" or "Nationalise the Top 200 Monopolies" or that "the TUC call a General Strike Now" you will know you have been misled; stand up and say that the speaker is a fraud for pretending to be speaking on behalf of the Socialist Party.
Labourism with knobs on
But quite apart from the dishonesty of trying to steal our name, Militant does not stand for socialism It stands for state capitalism as its long-term aim while campaigning in the present for mostly impracticable reforms of capitalism.
There is a twisted logic to their campaigning for impracticable reforms. As followers of Lenin, Trotskyists hold that workers are incapable of directly understanding socialist ideas; at most, they can only acquire a "trade union consciousness" which reflects itself on the political field as support for reformist, Labour Party-type politics. In these circumstances to campaign directly for socialism (as we in the real Socialist Party do) would be to cast pearls before swine, mere "abstract propagandism". Instead, what a "vanguard party" must do is to try to use this workers' reformist discontent as a battering ram to overthrow the government and seize power for themselves as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done in Russia in November 1917.
Trotsky recommended that this be done by offering workers reforms (called "transitional demands") which the vanguard party knows perfectly well can't be obtained under capitalism, in the expectation that when these reforms are not granted the workers will turn against the government and support a Trotskyist coup d'etat.
This of course is pure science-fiction politics that is only likely to come true on the planet Zanussi but (fortunately) not on planet Earth. Imagine what a Trotskyist dictatorship would be like; not too difierent from a Stalinist one, we would suppose.
In the context of the electoralist tactic that Militant has now adopted, "transitional demands" translate as extravagant election promises of reforms to be achieved under capitalism, bait offered to the mass of worker-electors who are still perceived of as not being able to move beyond a reformist, Labourist consciousness.
At election times, Militant Labour appears as a super-reformist party, promising the same sort of reforms as Labour only bigger and better ones. Thus, if Labour promises a minimum wage of £3 an hour, Militant Labour promises one of £6. If Labour promises to increase spending on education and the health service by 10 percent, Militant Labour promises to increase it by 50 percent. If Labour promises the highest achievable level of employment, Militant promises full employment, and so on. In other words, there is no attempt to combat reformist illusions within the working class (the illusion that capitalism can be reformed to work in their interest); just the opposite in fact, such illusions are encouraged and magnified.
Militant, by accommodating itself to this attitude instead of campaigning to change it, is encouraging workers to believe that their problems can be solved within capitalism if only those they elect as local councillors and MPs were more demanding and more determined.
It is in fact on this basis that Militant's local councillors have been elected: as militant Labourists, as people who some traditional Labour voters feel will sincerely fight for the reforms that New Labour under Blair has abandoned. "Militant Labour", the name under which they were elected, was an entirely accurate description as what those who elected them wanted was someone to fight in a more militant way for Labour's traditional aims.
Militant's Ideal World
Militant would deny this charge of encouraging reformism — of in fact being militant reformists — by pointing out that they do say that capitalism can never work in the workers' interests. This is so, but by "capitalism" they only mean competitive, private enterprise capitalism, to which their alternative is planned, state-run capitalism not socialism.
Last year Militant (22 March) carried an article headed "Fighting for our ideal world" which ended: "Militant Labour demands:
• An end to slave labour schemes;
• £6 per hour minimum wage;
• The right to join a recognised trade union"
Hardly an inspiring ideal (and this was in an article aimed at young people!). Normally, it is true, Militant's "ideal" is not quite as crass as this but the principle is the same. In 1995, at the time the Labour Party was preparing to ditch Clause 4, Militant brought out a pamphlet called What is Socialism? in which they declared:
Militant Labour believes it is possible to achieve a minimum wage, full employment, good education and health services. Homelessness can be a thing of the past. We can end inequality and poverty.
But we would also need an economy which produces more than it does today and produced different things: for example, fewer office blocks and more houses at affordable prices or rents, fewer weapons and more public transport.
This ideal world of higher wages and affordable prices is to be achieved by nationalising all "the major companies and financial institutions".
Such wholesale nationalisation would not be socialism which is based on the common (as opposed to state) ownership and democratic control of productive resources, with goods and services being produced and distributed directly to satisfy people's needs with the disappearance of wages, prices, pensions, banks, money and all the other products of a buying-and-selling society such as capitalism.
Militant's "ideal society" turns out to be a state capitalism in which a government, supposedly ruling on behalf of the working class (but in reality controlled by and for the benefit of the leaders of the vanguard party), tries to plan the wages -profits-money system and make it work in the interest of all.
They give Cuba, and previously Russia, as an example of the sort of "planned", "non-capitalist" economy they have in mind ("Can Cuba Survive?",Militant, 22 March 1996), not as a perfect example but as a sufficiently successful example to back up their claim that a nationalised, planned economy of the kind they propose can work. But both Cuba and pre-Yeltsin Russia had state-capitalist, not non-capitalist, economies. Neither the Russian nor the Cuban revolution "overthrew capitalism", as Militant claims. What they did was to change the personnel of the privileged class that was to preside over the accumulation of capital in these countries, from private capitalists and outside imperialists to a Party elite of state bureaucrats. That Militant see the economic system in Cuba and what used to exist in Russia as a model for what should replace capitalism confirms that they too stand for state capitalism.
But state capitalism is no more in the interest of the working class than is private capitalism. It still retains the wages system, under which people have to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer to get the money to buy the things they need to live. But where the wages system exists so does economic exploitation, since workers are always paid as wages less than the value of the work they do; the rest (Marx called it surplus value) is creamed off by their employers, whether a private individual, a company or a state enterprise, and redistributed as the privileged income of shareholders and/or state bureaucrats.
The Trotskyist proposal to nationalise all major industries and financial institutions and turn us all into state employees does not end the wages system; it merely changes who employs us (where, that is, we are not already government employees of one sort or another) and changes those who live off our work from private shareholders to state bureaucrats.
So Trotskyists like Militant are not even on the same wavelength as Socialists. It is not a question of us and them having the same aim but a different method of getting there — us, democratic political action by a democratically-organised and consciously socialist majority; them, a minority-led insurrection without majority socialist understanding. Their aim is quite different from ours. We want socialism and the abolition of the wages system; they want state capitalism with all of us being paid by the state.
In other words, even if we had some other name such as a World Socialist Party they would still have no justification for calling themselves "Socialist Party". If they had been honest (but that's science-fiction politics again) they would have changed their name to SCP or State Capitalist Party or, if that was felt to be too explicit, simply to "Trotskyist Party".
ADAM BUICK. Socialist Standard, February 1997
onsdag den 3. september 2008
the Great Minimum Wage Debate
A deafening hush fell upon the room as the Central Committee of the Slowcialist Workers Party (Official Vanguard to the Workers and Peasant Toilers of Britain) sat down to consider its "line" on the minimum wage. It was obvious, of course, that they must be seen to take a lead on this issue of the moment. After all, they would be urging workers to vote Labour in the next election and it was a crucially cunning Trotskyist tactic to make demands upon that government which it would be incapable of delivering, thus demonstrating for all to see that it is but another capitalist government not to be supported. (This, in turn, would lead the betrayed workers to turn to the iron leadership of the SWP which had told them to vote for their own betrayal.)
Around the table sat men with tactical minds only surpassed by their heroes who had fought that brave struggle at Kronstadt in 1921 against those who dared to criticise their leaders. These men (with the odd Kollontai thrown in for good balance) were the ones expecting to become the Lenins and Trotskys of the future British Bolshevik regime. But first things first, comrades; the task of the moment was to devise an unrealisable reform for the gullible followers to demand.
To his feet rose the impressive leadership figure of Vladimir Cliff, known to his followers as the greatest thinker since Lenin or Derek Hatton. "The inner circle has been considering the question for some months now, comrades. After long and hard discussion and calculation, and not without a few purges I might add, we have arrived at the revolutionary number. WE DEMAND A MINIMUM WAGE OF £4.15 AN HOUR."
The assembled cadres gasped with delight at the wisdom of the latter-day Lenin. It was so obvious, now it had been shown to them, that this was a figure which (a) would whip the workers into a frenzy of excitement; and (b) be utterly undeliverable by the ruling class. A piece of classical policy. The poster designers began work on ways to deliver this message to their followers.
But wait ... for in the heat of the revolutionary joy at the new reform a hand was raised. It was Harry Harrison, the token trade unionist on the Central Committee, always known by the others as 'arry and given the kind of attention deserved by those who are decent fools.
"I don't see why workers should have to put up with £4.15 an hour. It' s a bloody pittance." Impatience grew around the table. Had Harrison not yet realised that the iron discipline of Leninist organisation called for iron agreement on every rusty old worn-out tactic devised at the top? But Harry went on: "What we ought to be demanding is £4.50 an hour; I reckon that would be a decent wage."
Cliff rose. It was obvious that a strict rebuke was in order. Harrison's left-wing infantilism must be curbed. "Comrades," said Vladimir, his best Lenin-lookalike pose dominating the room "we must not allow ourselves to fall into the pit of utopianism. The last thing that we must do is offer reforms to the workers which make us look foolish. Our unrealisable reform demands must at all times look credible or we are lost in the desert of idealistic folly."
To the leader's support came Cracker Callinicos, the leader-in waiting and greatest pseudo-intellectual since Lenin tried to explain historical materialism: "Let it be well understood that the SWP cannot afford to say what workers do not expect to hear. Why, if we were to accept the Utopian demand of £4.50 an hour there could well be demands in our ranks for £14.50
an hour (not least from our university lecturer comrades who are already getting that) and . . . and who knows, the next thing we would see is a drift into dangerous talk about the abolition of wage-slavery altogether and then where would we be?"
Socialist Standard January 1996
Around the table sat men with tactical minds only surpassed by their heroes who had fought that brave struggle at Kronstadt in 1921 against those who dared to criticise their leaders. These men (with the odd Kollontai thrown in for good balance) were the ones expecting to become the Lenins and Trotskys of the future British Bolshevik regime. But first things first, comrades; the task of the moment was to devise an unrealisable reform for the gullible followers to demand.
To his feet rose the impressive leadership figure of Vladimir Cliff, known to his followers as the greatest thinker since Lenin or Derek Hatton. "The inner circle has been considering the question for some months now, comrades. After long and hard discussion and calculation, and not without a few purges I might add, we have arrived at the revolutionary number. WE DEMAND A MINIMUM WAGE OF £4.15 AN HOUR."
The assembled cadres gasped with delight at the wisdom of the latter-day Lenin. It was so obvious, now it had been shown to them, that this was a figure which (a) would whip the workers into a frenzy of excitement; and (b) be utterly undeliverable by the ruling class. A piece of classical policy. The poster designers began work on ways to deliver this message to their followers.
But wait ... for in the heat of the revolutionary joy at the new reform a hand was raised. It was Harry Harrison, the token trade unionist on the Central Committee, always known by the others as 'arry and given the kind of attention deserved by those who are decent fools.
"I don't see why workers should have to put up with £4.15 an hour. It' s a bloody pittance." Impatience grew around the table. Had Harrison not yet realised that the iron discipline of Leninist organisation called for iron agreement on every rusty old worn-out tactic devised at the top? But Harry went on: "What we ought to be demanding is £4.50 an hour; I reckon that would be a decent wage."
Cliff rose. It was obvious that a strict rebuke was in order. Harrison's left-wing infantilism must be curbed. "Comrades," said Vladimir, his best Lenin-lookalike pose dominating the room "we must not allow ourselves to fall into the pit of utopianism. The last thing that we must do is offer reforms to the workers which make us look foolish. Our unrealisable reform demands must at all times look credible or we are lost in the desert of idealistic folly."
To the leader's support came Cracker Callinicos, the leader-in waiting and greatest pseudo-intellectual since Lenin tried to explain historical materialism: "Let it be well understood that the SWP cannot afford to say what workers do not expect to hear. Why, if we were to accept the Utopian demand of £4.50 an hour there could well be demands in our ranks for £14.50
an hour (not least from our university lecturer comrades who are already getting that) and . . . and who knows, the next thing we would see is a drift into dangerous talk about the abolition of wage-slavery altogether and then where would we be?"
Socialist Standard January 1996
søndag den 24. august 2008
Trotsky: the prophet debunked
Trotsky was born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, the son of moderately well-off peasant farmers in the southern Ukraine, in 1879. As a student at the University of Odessa he became an anti-Tsarist revolutionary. He soon fell foul of the authorities and was sentenced to prison and exile in Siberia from where he escaped in 1902 using the name of one of his jailers on his false identity card; this name — Trotsky — he was to use for the rest of his life.
Trotsky played a prominent part in the 1905 revolt that followed Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, being elected the Chairman of the St. Petersburg "soviet" ("soviet" is simply the Russian word for "council"). Oddly in view of his later political evolution, when the split occurred in the Russian Social Democratic movement in 1903 between the Mensheviks (orthodox Social Democrats like Kautsky in Germany) and the Bolsheviks (supporters of Lenin and his concept of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries). Trotsky tended to favour the Mensheviks. Stalin and his supporters later took great pleasure in publishing one of Trotsky's writings from this period in which he violently criticised Lenin's conception of the party. Trotsky in fact tried to develop a middle position, evolving his own theory of how the anti-Tsarist revolution would develop.
Both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks saw the anti-Tsarist revolution as being one that would lead to the establishment of a bourgeois Democratic Republic in Russia (the difference between them was that the Mensheviks tended to see this as being done by the liberal bourgeoisie while the Bolsheviks said it would have to be the work of the vanguard party). Trotsky took up a different position, arguing that if the working class were to come to power in the course of the coming bourgeois revolution in Russia it was unreasonable to expect them to hand over power to the bourgeoisie; they would, and should according to Trotsky, take steps to transform society in a socialist direction.
Anti-Tsarist revolutionary
This theory, which Trotsky called "the theory of the permanent revolution", latching on to a phrase used by Marx in one of his articles on the abortive German bourgeois revolution of 1848-9, was absurd in that it implied that socialism could be on the agenda in economically backward Russia. It was however important historically as it was adopted by Lenin himself in April 1917 when he returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland. As a result Trotsky himself then rallied to the Bolsheviks.
In a very real sense Bolshevik ideology can be seen as a combination of Trotsky's theory of the revolution and Lenin's theory of the party. In 1930 Trotsky wrote a book called The History of the Russian Revolu¬tion, which is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand this event, not only because the author was an active participant in it but also because it unintentionally shows how this wasn't a working class socialist revolution but an anti-feudal revolution led by a vanguard party.
After the Bolshevik seizure of power Trotsky became, first, Commissar for Foreign Affairs and, then, Commander of thep Red Army which successfully won the Civil War against the "White Guards" supported by the Western powers. This gave him an immense prestige both in Russia and among sympathisers with the Russian revolution in the rest of the world. His attitude on other issues during this period was even more anti-working class than that of Lenin who, on one occasion, was forced to intervene to attack as going too far Trotsky's proposal to "militarise" labour and the trade unions.
After Lenin's death Trotsky was gradually eased out of power. He was exiled first to Alma Ata in Russian central Asia and then to Turkey, Norway and finally Mexico. If he had stayed in Russia he would almost certainly have been tortured, tried and shot like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and the other original leaders of the Bolshevik Party. All the same he still ended up with a Stalinist ice-pick in his head
Degenerate Workers State
In exile Trotsky played the role of "loyal opposition" to the Stalin regime in Russia. He was very critical of the political aspects of this regime (at least some of them, since he too stood for a one-party dictatorship in Russia), but to his dying day defended the view that the Russian revolution had established a "Workers State" in Russia (whatever that might be) and that this represented a gain for the working class both of Russia and of the whole world.
His view that Russia under Stalin was a Workers State, not a perfect one, certainly, but a Workers State nevertheless, was set out in his book The Revolution Betrayed first published in 1936. This is the origin of the Trotskyist dogma that Russia is a "degenerate Workers State" in which a bureaucracy had usurped political power from the working class but without changing the social basis (nationalisation and planning).
This view is so absurd as to be hardly worth considering seriously: how could the adjective "workers" be applied to a regime where workers could be sent to a labour camp for turning up late for work and shot for going on strike? Trotsky was only able to sustain his point of view by making the completely unmarxist assumption that capitalist distribution relations (the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could exist on the basis of socialist production relations. Marx, by contrast, had concluded, from a study of past and present societies, that the mode of distribution was entirely determined by the mode of production. Thus the existence of privileged distribution relations in Russia should itself have been sufficient proof that Russia had nothing to do with socialism.
Trotsky rejected the view that Russia was state capitalist on the flimsiest of grounds: the absence of a private capitalist class, of private shareholders and bondholders who could inherit and bequeath their property. He failed to see that what made Russia capitalist was the existence there of wage-labour and capital accumulation not the nature and mode of recruitment of its ruling class.
Trotsky's view that Russia under Stalin was still some sort of "Workers State" was so absurd that it soon aroused criticism within the ranks of the Trotskyist movement itself which, since 1938, had been organised as the Fourth International. Two alternative views emerged. One was that Russia was neither capitalist nor a Workers State but some new kind of exploiting class society. The other was that Russia was state capitalist. The most easily accessible example of the first view is James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and of the second Tony Cliff's Russia: A Marxist Analysis. Both books are well worth reading, though in fact neither Burnham nor Cliff could claim to be the originators of the theories they put forward. The majority of Trotskyists, however, remain committed to the dogma that Russia is a "degenerate Workers State".
Transitional Demands
Trotskyist theory and practice is rather neatly summed up in the opening sentence of the manifesto the Fourth International adopted at its foundation in 1938. Called The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, and drafted by Trotsky himself, it began with the absurd declaration: "The world political situation is chiefly characterised by historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat". This tendency to reduce everything to a question of the right leadership (Trotsky once wrote a pamphlet on the Paris Commune in which he explained its failure by the absence of a Bolshevik Party there) reminds us that Trotskyists are 100 per cent Leninists and believers in the vanguard party. They believe, in other words, that workers by their own efforts are incapable of emancipating themselves and so must be led by an enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries (generally bourgeois intellectuals like Lenin and Trotsky). Thus they fall under the general criticism of Leninism and indeed of all theories which proclaim that workers need leaders.
The other important point in the manifesto of the Fourth International was the concept of "transitional demands". The manifesto contained a whole list of reform demands which was called "the transitional programme". This reform programme was said to be different from those of openly reformist parties like Labour in Britain and the Social Democratic parties on the Continent in that Trotskyists claimed to be under no illusion that the reforms demanded could be achieved within the framework of capitalism. They were posed as bait by the vanguard party to get workers to struggle for them, on the theory that the workers would learn in the course of the struggle that these demands could not be achieved within capitalism and so would come to struggle (under the leadership of the vanguard party) to abolish capitalism.
Actually, most Trotskyists are not as cynical as they pretend to be here: in discussion with them you gain the clear impression that they share the illusion that the reforms they advocate can be achieved under capitalism (as, indeed, some of them could be). In other words, they are often the victims of their own "tactics".
Splits and sects
After the Second World War, all the Trotskyists in Britain were united for a time in a single organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which was affiliated to the Fourth International. All the leaders of the various Trotskyist sects (Gerry Healy, Ted Grant, Tony Cliff, etc) were together in the RCP.
Most of the splits that subsequently occurred were over the attitude to adopt towards Russia and the Cold War. The group around Cliff, as we have already noted, took the view that Russia had been state capitalist since about 1928 (up till then it had supposedly been a "Workers State"). Logically they adopted the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow". Longtime known as the "International Socialists" they are now the Socalist Workers Party. Except on Russia they share all the other Trotskyist illusions (vanguard party, transitional demands, etc).
In 1949 the RCP dissolved itself and most Trotskyists decided to join the Labour Party and "to bore from within". This tactic, known in Trotskyist parlance, as "entryism", is again based on the premise that the mass of the workers need leaders and are there to be manipulated. As would-be leaders of the working class, the argument goes, we must be where the workers are; as in Britain the Labour Party is "the mass party of the working class" this is where we Trotskyists must be if we are to have a chance of influencing (that is, manipulating) the workers.
After the general strike in France in May 1968, which seemed to show that student activists could influence the working class directly without needing to pass through "the mass party of the working class", most of the Trotskyist groups decided to abandon entryism and openly form their own parties. Thus parliamentary elections in Britain came to be enlivened by the presence of parties bearing such titles as "Workers Revolutionary Party", "Socialist Workers Party", "Revolutionary Communist Party", "Socialist Unity", etc. Needless to say, they got no more votes than we in the Socialist Party did.
This abandoning of entryism should not be interpreted as meaning opposition to the Labour Party, because nearly all the Trotskyist groups continue to support the election of a Labour government and to call on workers to vote Labour.
One Trotskyist sect, however, decided not to abandon the Labour Party after 1968 but to continue boring from within: the sect now known as the Militant Tendency (leader: Ted Grant). The absence of the other sects meant that they had a monopoly of this particular hunting ground. So when Labour turned left after 1979 they were there ready to recruit new members and increase their influence. In fact the Militant Tendency has undoubtedly been the most successful of all the Trotskyist groups that have ever infiltrated the Labour Party. They control a number of constituency parties as well as the Labour Party Young Socialists. There are even two or three Trotskyist MP's sitting on the Labour' benches at Westminster.
From an ideological point of view, the Militant Tendency follows orthodox Trotskyism. Thus, for instance, they regard Russia as a "degenerate Workers State" — which means they are more backward than many Labour Party members who willingly recognise that Russia is state capitalist.
Trotsky entirely identified capitalism with private capitalism and so concluded that society would cease to be capitalist once the private capitalist class had been expropriated. This meant that, in contrast to Lenin who mistakenly saw state capitalism as a necessary step towards socialism, Trotsky committed the different mistake of seeing state capitalism as the negation of capitalism. Trotskyism, the movement he gave rise to, is a blend of Leninism and Reformism, committed on paper to replacing private capitalism with state capitalism through a violent insurrection led by a vanguard party, but in practice working to achieve state capitalism through reforms to be enacted by Labour governments.
ALB - Socialist Standard August 1990
further reading
Are the managers really in control? parts one and two (pdf) looks at Burnham.
Trotsky played a prominent part in the 1905 revolt that followed Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, being elected the Chairman of the St. Petersburg "soviet" ("soviet" is simply the Russian word for "council"). Oddly in view of his later political evolution, when the split occurred in the Russian Social Democratic movement in 1903 between the Mensheviks (orthodox Social Democrats like Kautsky in Germany) and the Bolsheviks (supporters of Lenin and his concept of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries). Trotsky tended to favour the Mensheviks. Stalin and his supporters later took great pleasure in publishing one of Trotsky's writings from this period in which he violently criticised Lenin's conception of the party. Trotsky in fact tried to develop a middle position, evolving his own theory of how the anti-Tsarist revolution would develop.
Both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks saw the anti-Tsarist revolution as being one that would lead to the establishment of a bourgeois Democratic Republic in Russia (the difference between them was that the Mensheviks tended to see this as being done by the liberal bourgeoisie while the Bolsheviks said it would have to be the work of the vanguard party). Trotsky took up a different position, arguing that if the working class were to come to power in the course of the coming bourgeois revolution in Russia it was unreasonable to expect them to hand over power to the bourgeoisie; they would, and should according to Trotsky, take steps to transform society in a socialist direction.
Anti-Tsarist revolutionary
This theory, which Trotsky called "the theory of the permanent revolution", latching on to a phrase used by Marx in one of his articles on the abortive German bourgeois revolution of 1848-9, was absurd in that it implied that socialism could be on the agenda in economically backward Russia. It was however important historically as it was adopted by Lenin himself in April 1917 when he returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland. As a result Trotsky himself then rallied to the Bolsheviks.
In a very real sense Bolshevik ideology can be seen as a combination of Trotsky's theory of the revolution and Lenin's theory of the party. In 1930 Trotsky wrote a book called The History of the Russian Revolu¬tion, which is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand this event, not only because the author was an active participant in it but also because it unintentionally shows how this wasn't a working class socialist revolution but an anti-feudal revolution led by a vanguard party.
After the Bolshevik seizure of power Trotsky became, first, Commissar for Foreign Affairs and, then, Commander of thep Red Army which successfully won the Civil War against the "White Guards" supported by the Western powers. This gave him an immense prestige both in Russia and among sympathisers with the Russian revolution in the rest of the world. His attitude on other issues during this period was even more anti-working class than that of Lenin who, on one occasion, was forced to intervene to attack as going too far Trotsky's proposal to "militarise" labour and the trade unions.
After Lenin's death Trotsky was gradually eased out of power. He was exiled first to Alma Ata in Russian central Asia and then to Turkey, Norway and finally Mexico. If he had stayed in Russia he would almost certainly have been tortured, tried and shot like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and the other original leaders of the Bolshevik Party. All the same he still ended up with a Stalinist ice-pick in his head
Degenerate Workers State
In exile Trotsky played the role of "loyal opposition" to the Stalin regime in Russia. He was very critical of the political aspects of this regime (at least some of them, since he too stood for a one-party dictatorship in Russia), but to his dying day defended the view that the Russian revolution had established a "Workers State" in Russia (whatever that might be) and that this represented a gain for the working class both of Russia and of the whole world.
His view that Russia under Stalin was a Workers State, not a perfect one, certainly, but a Workers State nevertheless, was set out in his book The Revolution Betrayed first published in 1936. This is the origin of the Trotskyist dogma that Russia is a "degenerate Workers State" in which a bureaucracy had usurped political power from the working class but without changing the social basis (nationalisation and planning).
This view is so absurd as to be hardly worth considering seriously: how could the adjective "workers" be applied to a regime where workers could be sent to a labour camp for turning up late for work and shot for going on strike? Trotsky was only able to sustain his point of view by making the completely unmarxist assumption that capitalist distribution relations (the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could exist on the basis of socialist production relations. Marx, by contrast, had concluded, from a study of past and present societies, that the mode of distribution was entirely determined by the mode of production. Thus the existence of privileged distribution relations in Russia should itself have been sufficient proof that Russia had nothing to do with socialism.
Trotsky rejected the view that Russia was state capitalist on the flimsiest of grounds: the absence of a private capitalist class, of private shareholders and bondholders who could inherit and bequeath their property. He failed to see that what made Russia capitalist was the existence there of wage-labour and capital accumulation not the nature and mode of recruitment of its ruling class.
Trotsky's view that Russia under Stalin was still some sort of "Workers State" was so absurd that it soon aroused criticism within the ranks of the Trotskyist movement itself which, since 1938, had been organised as the Fourth International. Two alternative views emerged. One was that Russia was neither capitalist nor a Workers State but some new kind of exploiting class society. The other was that Russia was state capitalist. The most easily accessible example of the first view is James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and of the second Tony Cliff's Russia: A Marxist Analysis. Both books are well worth reading, though in fact neither Burnham nor Cliff could claim to be the originators of the theories they put forward. The majority of Trotskyists, however, remain committed to the dogma that Russia is a "degenerate Workers State".
Transitional Demands
Trotskyist theory and practice is rather neatly summed up in the opening sentence of the manifesto the Fourth International adopted at its foundation in 1938. Called The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, and drafted by Trotsky himself, it began with the absurd declaration: "The world political situation is chiefly characterised by historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat". This tendency to reduce everything to a question of the right leadership (Trotsky once wrote a pamphlet on the Paris Commune in which he explained its failure by the absence of a Bolshevik Party there) reminds us that Trotskyists are 100 per cent Leninists and believers in the vanguard party. They believe, in other words, that workers by their own efforts are incapable of emancipating themselves and so must be led by an enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries (generally bourgeois intellectuals like Lenin and Trotsky). Thus they fall under the general criticism of Leninism and indeed of all theories which proclaim that workers need leaders.
The other important point in the manifesto of the Fourth International was the concept of "transitional demands". The manifesto contained a whole list of reform demands which was called "the transitional programme". This reform programme was said to be different from those of openly reformist parties like Labour in Britain and the Social Democratic parties on the Continent in that Trotskyists claimed to be under no illusion that the reforms demanded could be achieved within the framework of capitalism. They were posed as bait by the vanguard party to get workers to struggle for them, on the theory that the workers would learn in the course of the struggle that these demands could not be achieved within capitalism and so would come to struggle (under the leadership of the vanguard party) to abolish capitalism.
Actually, most Trotskyists are not as cynical as they pretend to be here: in discussion with them you gain the clear impression that they share the illusion that the reforms they advocate can be achieved under capitalism (as, indeed, some of them could be). In other words, they are often the victims of their own "tactics".
Splits and sects
After the Second World War, all the Trotskyists in Britain were united for a time in a single organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which was affiliated to the Fourth International. All the leaders of the various Trotskyist sects (Gerry Healy, Ted Grant, Tony Cliff, etc) were together in the RCP.
Most of the splits that subsequently occurred were over the attitude to adopt towards Russia and the Cold War. The group around Cliff, as we have already noted, took the view that Russia had been state capitalist since about 1928 (up till then it had supposedly been a "Workers State"). Logically they adopted the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow". Longtime known as the "International Socialists" they are now the Socalist Workers Party. Except on Russia they share all the other Trotskyist illusions (vanguard party, transitional demands, etc).
In 1949 the RCP dissolved itself and most Trotskyists decided to join the Labour Party and "to bore from within". This tactic, known in Trotskyist parlance, as "entryism", is again based on the premise that the mass of the workers need leaders and are there to be manipulated. As would-be leaders of the working class, the argument goes, we must be where the workers are; as in Britain the Labour Party is "the mass party of the working class" this is where we Trotskyists must be if we are to have a chance of influencing (that is, manipulating) the workers.
After the general strike in France in May 1968, which seemed to show that student activists could influence the working class directly without needing to pass through "the mass party of the working class", most of the Trotskyist groups decided to abandon entryism and openly form their own parties. Thus parliamentary elections in Britain came to be enlivened by the presence of parties bearing such titles as "Workers Revolutionary Party", "Socialist Workers Party", "Revolutionary Communist Party", "Socialist Unity", etc. Needless to say, they got no more votes than we in the Socialist Party did.
This abandoning of entryism should not be interpreted as meaning opposition to the Labour Party, because nearly all the Trotskyist groups continue to support the election of a Labour government and to call on workers to vote Labour.
One Trotskyist sect, however, decided not to abandon the Labour Party after 1968 but to continue boring from within: the sect now known as the Militant Tendency (leader: Ted Grant). The absence of the other sects meant that they had a monopoly of this particular hunting ground. So when Labour turned left after 1979 they were there ready to recruit new members and increase their influence. In fact the Militant Tendency has undoubtedly been the most successful of all the Trotskyist groups that have ever infiltrated the Labour Party. They control a number of constituency parties as well as the Labour Party Young Socialists. There are even two or three Trotskyist MP's sitting on the Labour' benches at Westminster.
From an ideological point of view, the Militant Tendency follows orthodox Trotskyism. Thus, for instance, they regard Russia as a "degenerate Workers State" — which means they are more backward than many Labour Party members who willingly recognise that Russia is state capitalist.
Trotsky entirely identified capitalism with private capitalism and so concluded that society would cease to be capitalist once the private capitalist class had been expropriated. This meant that, in contrast to Lenin who mistakenly saw state capitalism as a necessary step towards socialism, Trotsky committed the different mistake of seeing state capitalism as the negation of capitalism. Trotskyism, the movement he gave rise to, is a blend of Leninism and Reformism, committed on paper to replacing private capitalism with state capitalism through a violent insurrection led by a vanguard party, but in practice working to achieve state capitalism through reforms to be enacted by Labour governments.
ALB - Socialist Standard August 1990
further reading
Are the managers really in control? parts one and two (pdf) looks at Burnham.
lørdag den 23. august 2008
Against the Left (part 3)
III. TROTSKYISM
Lenin's prophecy that Stalin would not be capable of using the authority of the State with 'sufficient daution" has led some Leninists to believe that had Stalin not achieved supreme power after 1929 the tragic phenomenon which historians have called 'Stalinism' would not have occurred. It is claimed that the political purges, the massacre of millions of peasants in the drive for "collectivisation", the outlawing of effective trade unions, the forced labour camps, the diplomatic pact with the Nazis, were all mere accidents of history, avoidable had the 'distinguished' and 'outstandingly able' Leon Trotsky had his way. But material conditions, not 'Great Men', make history; there is nothing in any of Lenin's speeches or writings to indicate that he would have led the Soviet Union along a different, more humane, course thian that taken by his successors. In his dying years Lenin began to realise the impossibility of creating socialism in one country. Capitalism had to be developed.
The euphoria with which the Left greeted the Bolshevik revolution was only matched by its conspicuous silence regarding subsequent atrocities committed by the Soviet dictatorship; the Communist Party defended Stalin to the end. The small voice of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which had asserted since 1917 that the Bolsheviks could only build state capitalism, was generally ignored. The Left's response to the tragic consequences of Bolshevism was Trotskyism. Put simply, the Trotskyist argument was that the Bolsheviks had established a Socialist state, that from 1929, when Stalin took power, the revolution had degenerated and the party bureacracy taken power avAay from the masses and that had Trotsky succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet state this degeneration would not have occurred.
After his expulsion from Russia, for opposing the other leaders of the Communist Party, Trotsky helped to set up the so-called Fourth International. The founding congress was attended by twenty one delegates from eleven organisations, the largest being the American Socialist Workers' Party with 1,500 mem¬bers. The main aims of the Fourth International were to oppose Stalinism and to advocate so-called 'transitional demands' (reforms). Whilst repudiating Stalin, it remained true to Lenin.
Trotskyism was an ideological saviour for the Left who used it to preach the correctness of Bolshevik tactics, but at the same time deprecate their inevitable outcome. It was no longer necessary to go through absurd theoretical contortions to defend Russia; the new fashion was to call Russia a degenerate workers' state and hope that nobody would ask what a 'work¬ers' state' is or the cause of its degeneration from one stage of historical evolution to an earlier stage.
Today, as the Labour Party exposes itself more and more as a tool of the ruling class, and as the Communist Party is in decline, the most vociferous element on the British Left is Trotskyism. It is worth considering who the Trotskyists are, what they stand for, and where, if at all, they differ from the traditional Left. A recent pamphlet published by Big Flame entitled The Revolution Unfinished?—A critique of Trotskyism contiains a glossary of no less than fourteen existing British Trotskyist groups. For factual reference, an abbreviated version is given below.
1. Revolutionary Socialist League. Paper: Militant. Controls Labour Party Young Socialists. Officially does not exist.
2. International Marxist Group. Papers: Socialist Challenge and International. Official British section of the Fourth International.
3. Workers Revolutionary Party. Paper: Newsline(daily). Led by actress Vanessa Redgrave.
4. Socialist Workers Party(previously International Socialists) Papers: Socialist Worker and Socialist Review. Not part of mainstream Trotskyism. Claim that Russia
was Socialist, but became State capitalist under Stalin.
5. International Communist League. Paper: Workers Action.
6. Workers Socialist League. Paper: Workers Press.
7. Workers League. Paper: Workers News.
8. Revolutionary Communist Group. Paper: Revoiutionary Communist.
9. League for Socialist Action.
10. Revolutionary Marxist Current.
11. Chartists. Paper: Chartist. Exists within Labour Party.
12. Marxist Worker.
13. Revolutionary Workers Party. Supporters of Posadas in Fourth International.
14. Revolutionary Marxist Tendency. Supporters of Pablo in Fourth International.
It would be wrong to imagine, from this list, that Trotskyism is a significant political force. Most of the organisations listed are tiny, inactive sects, unimportant in terms of propaganda and effect on working class thought. Attempts have been made to unite them, but unity conferences have usually led to even further splits.
While Trotskyism clearly cannot be examined on the basis of only one group, nevertheless, certain characteristics unite all Troskyist groups. Firstly, they are committed to the outdated concept of Bolshevism.
They do not see revolution as involving the vast majority of the working class, but as a small, conspiratorial affair in which the party leads the masses to the violent overthrow of the existing State.
Secondly, Trotskyists have a Bolshevik attitude to political democracy. Not only are their organisations based on Leninist democratic centralism whereby power flows from the leadership downwards, but their attitude to revolution is undemocratic:
Thirdly, they accept the Leninist conception of Socialism (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as 'the first stage' of Communism. They reject the SPGBS claim that Socialism and Communism both mean a stateless, propertyless, classless society which can be attained immediately. According to Socialist Worker
Fourthly, Trotskyists are reformists, advocating a list of what Trotsky called 'transitional demands'. These range from demands for a minimum wage to giving advice to the Government on how to run foreign policy.
A fifth characteristic is that they all advise workers to vote Labour when it comes to election time. Despite their professed recognition that Labour is a capitalist party they consistently come to the aid of the Callaghans and the Healeys at the crucial hour. For instance, Red Weekly, then paper of the IMG, stated before the February 1974 election that
Which in lay terms means, Vote Labour. Well, the working class elected two Labour Governments in 1974, one in February and one in October. One would have expected Red Weekly to be doubly jubilant. Not so:
Trotskyism might be seen as a synthesis of the politics of the Communist and Labour parties. It reflects the early Communist Party in its apparent militancy, its repetition of empty slogans and its vanguardism. It follows the path of the Labour Party in its reformism and complete dishonesty. Trotskyism has nothing to offer the working class
S.C.; Socialist Standard October 1978
Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the Central committee on the question of the People's Commissariat for Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability, he is personally perhaps the most capable man on the present Central committee . . . (Lenin's Testament, dictated between 23rd and 31st December, 1922)
Lenin's prophecy that Stalin would not be capable of using the authority of the State with 'sufficient daution" has led some Leninists to believe that had Stalin not achieved supreme power after 1929 the tragic phenomenon which historians have called 'Stalinism' would not have occurred. It is claimed that the political purges, the massacre of millions of peasants in the drive for "collectivisation", the outlawing of effective trade unions, the forced labour camps, the diplomatic pact with the Nazis, were all mere accidents of history, avoidable had the 'distinguished' and 'outstandingly able' Leon Trotsky had his way. But material conditions, not 'Great Men', make history; there is nothing in any of Lenin's speeches or writings to indicate that he would have led the Soviet Union along a different, more humane, course thian that taken by his successors. In his dying years Lenin began to realise the impossibility of creating socialism in one country. Capitalism had to be developed.
The euphoria with which the Left greeted the Bolshevik revolution was only matched by its conspicuous silence regarding subsequent atrocities committed by the Soviet dictatorship; the Communist Party defended Stalin to the end. The small voice of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which had asserted since 1917 that the Bolsheviks could only build state capitalism, was generally ignored. The Left's response to the tragic consequences of Bolshevism was Trotskyism. Put simply, the Trotskyist argument was that the Bolsheviks had established a Socialist state, that from 1929, when Stalin took power, the revolution had degenerated and the party bureacracy taken power avAay from the masses and that had Trotsky succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet state this degeneration would not have occurred.
After his expulsion from Russia, for opposing the other leaders of the Communist Party, Trotsky helped to set up the so-called Fourth International. The founding congress was attended by twenty one delegates from eleven organisations, the largest being the American Socialist Workers' Party with 1,500 mem¬bers. The main aims of the Fourth International were to oppose Stalinism and to advocate so-called 'transitional demands' (reforms). Whilst repudiating Stalin, it remained true to Lenin.
Trotskyism was an ideological saviour for the Left who used it to preach the correctness of Bolshevik tactics, but at the same time deprecate their inevitable outcome. It was no longer necessary to go through absurd theoretical contortions to defend Russia; the new fashion was to call Russia a degenerate workers' state and hope that nobody would ask what a 'work¬ers' state' is or the cause of its degeneration from one stage of historical evolution to an earlier stage.
Today, as the Labour Party exposes itself more and more as a tool of the ruling class, and as the Communist Party is in decline, the most vociferous element on the British Left is Trotskyism. It is worth considering who the Trotskyists are, what they stand for, and where, if at all, they differ from the traditional Left. A recent pamphlet published by Big Flame entitled The Revolution Unfinished?—A critique of Trotskyism contiains a glossary of no less than fourteen existing British Trotskyist groups. For factual reference, an abbreviated version is given below.
1. Revolutionary Socialist League. Paper: Militant. Controls Labour Party Young Socialists. Officially does not exist.
2. International Marxist Group. Papers: Socialist Challenge and International. Official British section of the Fourth International.
3. Workers Revolutionary Party. Paper: Newsline(daily). Led by actress Vanessa Redgrave.
4. Socialist Workers Party(previously International Socialists) Papers: Socialist Worker and Socialist Review. Not part of mainstream Trotskyism. Claim that Russia
was Socialist, but became State capitalist under Stalin.
5. International Communist League. Paper: Workers Action.
6. Workers Socialist League. Paper: Workers Press.
7. Workers League. Paper: Workers News.
8. Revolutionary Communist Group. Paper: Revoiutionary Communist.
9. League for Socialist Action.
10. Revolutionary Marxist Current.
11. Chartists. Paper: Chartist. Exists within Labour Party.
12. Marxist Worker.
13. Revolutionary Workers Party. Supporters of Posadas in Fourth International.
14. Revolutionary Marxist Tendency. Supporters of Pablo in Fourth International.
It would be wrong to imagine, from this list, that Trotskyism is a significant political force. Most of the organisations listed are tiny, inactive sects, unimportant in terms of propaganda and effect on working class thought. Attempts have been made to unite them, but unity conferences have usually led to even further splits.
While Trotskyism clearly cannot be examined on the basis of only one group, nevertheless, certain characteristics unite all Troskyist groups. Firstly, they are committed to the outdated concept of Bolshevism.
They do not see revolution as involving the vast majority of the working class, but as a small, conspiratorial affair in which the party leads the masses to the violent overthrow of the existing State.
Secondly, Trotskyists have a Bolshevik attitude to political democracy. Not only are their organisations based on Leninist democratic centralism whereby power flows from the leadership downwards, but their attitude to revolution is undemocratic:
Such a programme as outlined here will not be legislated through parliament. Whilst we have no objections to framing any of these demands for passage through parliament, we know that this institution is there to serve capitalism, not preside over is destruction. Only a mass mobilisation of the workers' movement can win these demands. Only when this mass mobilisation is able to throw the State and parliament into chaos and when the committees established by the mass movement have taken affairs into their own hands will it really be possible to sort things out. The most likely form of such a struggle in Britain, but not necessarily the only one, would be a general strike. (International Marxist Group Revolutionary Socialism—Why and How, P. 19)
Thirdly, they accept the Leninist conception of Socialism (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as 'the first stage' of Communism. They reject the SPGBS claim that Socialism and Communism both mean a stateless, propertyless, classless society which can be attained immediately. According to Socialist Worker
Socialism is the nationalisation of the land, banks and major industries without compensation and under workers' control.
Fourthly, Trotskyists are reformists, advocating a list of what Trotsky called 'transitional demands'. These range from demands for a minimum wage to giving advice to the Government on how to run foreign policy.
A fifth characteristic is that they all advise workers to vote Labour when it comes to election time. Despite their professed recognition that Labour is a capitalist party they consistently come to the aid of the Callaghans and the Healeys at the crucial hour. For instance, Red Weekly, then paper of the IMG, stated before the February 1974 election that
Of course this election is not irrelevant. A Tory victory would signify that the working class was divided and hesitant about going into struggle ... A Labour victory would show that the Working class was united against the Tories and create expectations amongst every section of workers that could rapidly be turned into mass action. For that reason we say SMASH THE TORIES ON ALL FRONTS — VOTE LABOUR, BUT RELY ON YOUR OWN STRUGGLES.
Which in lay terms means, Vote Labour. Well, the working class elected two Labour Governments in 1974, one in February and one in October. One would have expected Red Weekly to be doubly jubilant. Not so:
What this election has demonstrated is that the working class must place no confidence in the Labour Party. (12th October, 1974)
Trotskyism might be seen as a synthesis of the politics of the Communist and Labour parties. It reflects the early Communist Party in its apparent militancy, its repetition of empty slogans and its vanguardism. It follows the path of the Labour Party in its reformism and complete dishonesty. Trotskyism has nothing to offer the working class
S.C.; Socialist Standard October 1978
Questions of the Day (part 10)
The so-called Left-wing parties
DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY all kinds of political action were discussed and advocated by various working class groups: political strikes, armed revolt, sabotage, bomb-throwing, assassination, demonstrations, petitions to Parliament, and seeking the help of the Liberal and Tory Parties.
With the extension of the franchise to male workers with the Reform Acts of 1867 and1884 a new phase opened. It was then that parties were formed, claiming to be socialist, that were to have a continuing influence on working class politics: the Fabian Society and Social Democratic Federation in 1884 and the Independent Labour Party in 1893. Unsound theories from the early nineteenth century or thrown up by the new parties are still to be found in the modern so-called 'Left-wing' organisations.
Like the modern 'Left-wing' organisations all three parties claimed to seek the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism.
In 1893 the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation (S.D.F.) signed the 'Manifesto of English Socialists' which declared:
"We look to put an end for ever to the wages system, to sweep away all distinctions of class, and eventually to establish national and international communism on a sound basis".
The I.L.P., which was then in process of formation, did not sign the Manifesto but would not have dissented from its declaration. Keir Hardie, founder of the I.L.P. (later to become 'father of the Labour Party'), could still claim several years later that their aim was "free communism in which . . . the rule of life will be: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (From Serfdom to Socialism, 1907). Also that "The Labour Party is the only expression of orthodox Marxian Socialism in Great Britain" (My Confession of Faith 1910). Of course this was said to placate his followers and there was nothing in the Labour Party to justify it.
What separated the three parties at the beginning was their conception of how their aims were to be achieved.
Through the dissemination of specialist information amcng politicians and administrators, the Fabians hoped to enlighten political opinion generally on the need, step by step, to introduce measures of social reform and nationalisation — the policy known as 'gradualism'. The S.D.F. aimed to build up an independent socialist party based on Marxist ideas. It soon learned, from the very small number of votes given to its candidates at elections, that no quick growth could be expected on that basis. Seeing this the I.L.P. concluded that straight socialist principles were unacceptable to the workers and decided that growth of membership must come before growth of socialist knowledge. They adopted the policy of building up a non-socialist membership on a programme of reforms with the hope that acceptance of socialist ideas would come later. It was the policy of involvement and support for every demonstration of discontent in the trade unions and elsewhere: "getting with the workers in the day-to-day struggle", no matter how trivial the issue.
The S.D.F. also became affected by this policy which in 1904 was to lead to the breakaway movement establish¬ing the SPGB, based on frank acceptance that winning over the workers to socialist principles is a difficult and slow process. It was made more difficult by the refomist propaganda of the Fabians, the I.L.P. and the S.D.F.
At the end of the century all three of those parties, particularly the Fabians and the I.L.P, turned their attention to building up a mass party with trade union backing — the Labour Party.
The I.L.P. line appeared to succeed beyond even what had been hoped from it. Backed by trade union votes and money, the Labour Party grew in membership and representation in Parliament, and I.L.P. influence seemed to grow with it. After the 1929 General Election more than two hundred Labour M.P.s were members of the I.L.P.,
though most were Labour, not I.L.P. nominees; but by that time the Labour Party leaders and trade unions had no further use for the I.L.P. What it had done was to bring about its own destruction. Its original justification for its policy — that of converting the Labour Party into a socialist party — had been a total failure. The Labour Party has made no progress whatever towards understanding and accepting the socialist objective defined at the outset by the Fabians, the S.D.F. and I.L.P. Today this applies equally to the 'Tribune Group' and others in the Labour Party who style themselves 'Left-wing', and to the trade unions.
In 1917, after the Communists had succeeded in capturing power in Russia, a strong old style influence came into British politics. The Communist Party of Great Britain, formed out of the membership of several existing bodies, was before long to take the lead among 'Left-wing' organisations. Owing to its mixed membership it was divided about Parliamentary action; but along with the old I.L.P. policy of seeking reforms and "getting with the workers in the day-to-day struggle", it took its line from Russia. At that time this meant advocating dictatorship and armed revolt. Mr. W. Gallacher, a member of their Central Committee and later Communist Party M.P., declared:
"They had talked of a Revolutionary Workers' government, but did they realise what was implied? Would the organisation of the workers for the revolutionary government be a legal one? The task of fighting for a revolutionary government would be a task of bringing the workers out on to the streets against the armed forces of Capitalism" (Workers Life, 6 December 1929).
In one of the periods when they were not telling the workers to vote for MacDonald and other Labour Party leaders, they also carried on a campaign of smashing up opponents' meetings. This was announced by Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary of the C.P.G.B., in the Daily Worker (29 January 1930):
"There should not be a Labour Meeting held anywhere, but what the revolutionary workers in that district attend such meetings and fight against the speakers, whatever they are, so-called 'Left','Right' or 'Centre'. They should never be allowed to address the workers. This will bring us in conflict with the authorities, but this must be done. The fight can no longer be conducted in a passive manner .... The Communist Party and its organ, the Daily Worker, will lead the working class, fighting boldly and openly, against this present government of scoundrels and agents of capitalism".
The government of the day was a Labour Government; but before long the Communist Party was again calling on the workers to vote Labour as it had done at some previous elections. Smashing up opponents' meetings still finds favour with some of the 'Left-wing' self-styled 'democrats'.
Now, in line with the shift of policy of the Communist Parties of France and Italy, the C.P.G.B. presents itself as an ordinary, 'respectable', reformist party using parliamentary methods and seeking to compete with the Labour Party on its own ground. Its election programmes are full of reform proposals paralleling those of the Labour Party: but on each one pressing for a little more than the Labour Party considers it expedient to ask. An example of the distance travelled since the days of 'heavy civil war' is in the Communist Party's attitude to the property and incomes of the rich. In their election programme in 1929 (which described the Labour Party as "the third capitalist party) the demand was made for the confiscation of "all personal incomes over £5,000 a year", confiscation of all fortunes over £1,000 at death, and repudiation of the National Debt, In those days Communist Party propaganda scorned
'Fabian gradualism'; but their election programme in 1970 had as one of its 'principal proposals' an annual wealth tax "on all fortunes over £20,000" to be at an average of three per cent". What could be more gradual than that?
But the shift of the Communist Party over to ordinary reformist parliamentary action created a vacuum which has been filled by a medley of organisations, claiming to be 'further left', and in practice adopting policies like those of the Communist Party half a century ago, including what the Party had taken over from the I.L.P. They include so-called communists who support State capitalist China aaainst State capitalist Russia — or the other way round — and several brands of Trotskyists'.
So now the 'further left' organisations use against the Communist Party the fallacious arguments formerly used by that Party. For example, the Socialist Worker (published by I.S., now called Socialist Workers Party), in its issue of 27 July 1973, denounced the Communist Party's "parliamentary road to Socialism". This was on the ground that the working class cannot take control of Parliament through elections; that Parliament does not control the State machine, and that the State machine cannot be used to change the rest of society completely. That the Communist Party road is not one to Socialism is true enough; but criticism of the Communist Party has no bearing on the case for a socialist working class gaining control of Parliament. An astonishing statement by the S.W.P. in criticism of the Communist Party is that the working class would be out-voted by "the middle class and ruling class". As the working class constitute ninety per cent of the electorate (see section "What is Capitalism") they obviously do not understand who the working class are. And an article by Paul Foot, editor of the Socialist Worker (The Times, 14 August 1975) maintained that, as the Wilson Government had failed to do anything for Socialism, this proved that Parliament could not be used by Socialists — ignoring the fact that the Labour Government did not have and did not seek a mandate for Socialism from the electorate, and represents a Party which stands for the perpetuation of capitalism.
The 'Left-wing' organisations generally claim to be Marxist; but they interpret this to mean either the anti-Marxist policy of Lenin based on Louis Blanqui's doctrine of minority armed seizure of power followed by dictatorship, or the equally anti-Marxist doctrine which holds that the workers can revolutionise society without needing to control the State power. In the field of economics the 'Left-wing' organisations mostly reject Marx's analysis of capitalism in favour of the myth of the Keynesians: that capitalism can be operated without unemployment through "managed expansion of demand" — that is, through inflation.
Those who accept Keynesian doctrines cannot accept the Marxist explanation of inflation. The Communist Party of Great Britain in its October 1974 Election Programme attributed inflation to a variety of causes, including V.A.T., membership of the E.E.C. and armaments expenditure, with no mention of Marxist theory.
International Socialism (March 1974) gave as explanation "The present inflation is similar in many ways to the upsurge in prices, wages and interest rates which occurred at the height of the classical boom". The boom was by then already over and the depression had begun. In the depression prices rose faster than ever. On their theory prices ought to have been falling.
The other journal of the same organisation (Socialist Worker, 4 August 1973) gave a different explanation which supported the idea that wage increases "must have some effect on prices". "Of course they do. Quite simply, business raises its prices when increases in costs threaten its profit margins".
But whereas the C.P.G.B. ignored Marx, the Socialist Worker repudiated the Marxist explanation, under the impression that it is something invented by Mr. Enoch Powell.
"But Enoch Powell says it is all the fault of the government printing too much money. This is an illusion even shared by some on the left".
Statements of socialist principles and the Marxist conception of the classless socialist system of society to replace capitalism never appear in the propaganda of the 'Left-wing' organisations.
One crucial test for the 'Left-wing' organisations concerns their willingness to create confusion by urging the workers to support capitalism administered by Laboor government. At the February 1974 Genera Election the following organisations all told the workers to vote for Labour candidates.
Communist Party of Great Britam
International Marxist Group
International Socialists (now Socialists Workers Party)
Workers Fight
Workers Revolutionary Party
The Tory Mr. Enoch Powell was also telling the electorate to vote Labour!
The tactic of supporting one administration of capitalism against another on the ground that, on particular issues or in general, there are fine shades of difference, is a reactionary survival of the old practice of voting Liberal against Tory or Tory against Liberal. (During the second world war it led the Communist Party to support Tory candidates.)
Even if it achieved small temporary gains this would count for nothing against the harm done by encouraging the workers to believe that their interest can be served by placing in power the enemies of Socialism. On this ground alone, apart from the rest of the case against them, the so-called 'Left-wing' organisations have no claim to working class support.
Further Reading
The Dead Russians Society
DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY all kinds of political action were discussed and advocated by various working class groups: political strikes, armed revolt, sabotage, bomb-throwing, assassination, demonstrations, petitions to Parliament, and seeking the help of the Liberal and Tory Parties.
With the extension of the franchise to male workers with the Reform Acts of 1867 and1884 a new phase opened. It was then that parties were formed, claiming to be socialist, that were to have a continuing influence on working class politics: the Fabian Society and Social Democratic Federation in 1884 and the Independent Labour Party in 1893. Unsound theories from the early nineteenth century or thrown up by the new parties are still to be found in the modern so-called 'Left-wing' organisations.
Like the modern 'Left-wing' organisations all three parties claimed to seek the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism.
In 1893 the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation (S.D.F.) signed the 'Manifesto of English Socialists' which declared:
"We look to put an end for ever to the wages system, to sweep away all distinctions of class, and eventually to establish national and international communism on a sound basis".
The I.L.P., which was then in process of formation, did not sign the Manifesto but would not have dissented from its declaration. Keir Hardie, founder of the I.L.P. (later to become 'father of the Labour Party'), could still claim several years later that their aim was "free communism in which . . . the rule of life will be: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (From Serfdom to Socialism, 1907). Also that "The Labour Party is the only expression of orthodox Marxian Socialism in Great Britain" (My Confession of Faith 1910). Of course this was said to placate his followers and there was nothing in the Labour Party to justify it.
What separated the three parties at the beginning was their conception of how their aims were to be achieved.
Through the dissemination of specialist information amcng politicians and administrators, the Fabians hoped to enlighten political opinion generally on the need, step by step, to introduce measures of social reform and nationalisation — the policy known as 'gradualism'. The S.D.F. aimed to build up an independent socialist party based on Marxist ideas. It soon learned, from the very small number of votes given to its candidates at elections, that no quick growth could be expected on that basis. Seeing this the I.L.P. concluded that straight socialist principles were unacceptable to the workers and decided that growth of membership must come before growth of socialist knowledge. They adopted the policy of building up a non-socialist membership on a programme of reforms with the hope that acceptance of socialist ideas would come later. It was the policy of involvement and support for every demonstration of discontent in the trade unions and elsewhere: "getting with the workers in the day-to-day struggle", no matter how trivial the issue.
The S.D.F. also became affected by this policy which in 1904 was to lead to the breakaway movement establish¬ing the SPGB, based on frank acceptance that winning over the workers to socialist principles is a difficult and slow process. It was made more difficult by the refomist propaganda of the Fabians, the I.L.P. and the S.D.F.
At the end of the century all three of those parties, particularly the Fabians and the I.L.P, turned their attention to building up a mass party with trade union backing — the Labour Party.
The I.L.P. line appeared to succeed beyond even what had been hoped from it. Backed by trade union votes and money, the Labour Party grew in membership and representation in Parliament, and I.L.P. influence seemed to grow with it. After the 1929 General Election more than two hundred Labour M.P.s were members of the I.L.P.,
though most were Labour, not I.L.P. nominees; but by that time the Labour Party leaders and trade unions had no further use for the I.L.P. What it had done was to bring about its own destruction. Its original justification for its policy — that of converting the Labour Party into a socialist party — had been a total failure. The Labour Party has made no progress whatever towards understanding and accepting the socialist objective defined at the outset by the Fabians, the S.D.F. and I.L.P. Today this applies equally to the 'Tribune Group' and others in the Labour Party who style themselves 'Left-wing', and to the trade unions.
In 1917, after the Communists had succeeded in capturing power in Russia, a strong old style influence came into British politics. The Communist Party of Great Britain, formed out of the membership of several existing bodies, was before long to take the lead among 'Left-wing' organisations. Owing to its mixed membership it was divided about Parliamentary action; but along with the old I.L.P. policy of seeking reforms and "getting with the workers in the day-to-day struggle", it took its line from Russia. At that time this meant advocating dictatorship and armed revolt. Mr. W. Gallacher, a member of their Central Committee and later Communist Party M.P., declared:
"They had talked of a Revolutionary Workers' government, but did they realise what was implied? Would the organisation of the workers for the revolutionary government be a legal one? The task of fighting for a revolutionary government would be a task of bringing the workers out on to the streets against the armed forces of Capitalism" (Workers Life, 6 December 1929).
In one of the periods when they were not telling the workers to vote for MacDonald and other Labour Party leaders, they also carried on a campaign of smashing up opponents' meetings. This was announced by Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary of the C.P.G.B., in the Daily Worker (29 January 1930):
"There should not be a Labour Meeting held anywhere, but what the revolutionary workers in that district attend such meetings and fight against the speakers, whatever they are, so-called 'Left','Right' or 'Centre'. They should never be allowed to address the workers. This will bring us in conflict with the authorities, but this must be done. The fight can no longer be conducted in a passive manner .... The Communist Party and its organ, the Daily Worker, will lead the working class, fighting boldly and openly, against this present government of scoundrels and agents of capitalism".
The government of the day was a Labour Government; but before long the Communist Party was again calling on the workers to vote Labour as it had done at some previous elections. Smashing up opponents' meetings still finds favour with some of the 'Left-wing' self-styled 'democrats'.
Now, in line with the shift of policy of the Communist Parties of France and Italy, the C.P.G.B. presents itself as an ordinary, 'respectable', reformist party using parliamentary methods and seeking to compete with the Labour Party on its own ground. Its election programmes are full of reform proposals paralleling those of the Labour Party: but on each one pressing for a little more than the Labour Party considers it expedient to ask. An example of the distance travelled since the days of 'heavy civil war' is in the Communist Party's attitude to the property and incomes of the rich. In their election programme in 1929 (which described the Labour Party as "the third capitalist party) the demand was made for the confiscation of "all personal incomes over £5,000 a year", confiscation of all fortunes over £1,000 at death, and repudiation of the National Debt, In those days Communist Party propaganda scorned
'Fabian gradualism'; but their election programme in 1970 had as one of its 'principal proposals' an annual wealth tax "on all fortunes over £20,000" to be at an average of three per cent". What could be more gradual than that?
But the shift of the Communist Party over to ordinary reformist parliamentary action created a vacuum which has been filled by a medley of organisations, claiming to be 'further left', and in practice adopting policies like those of the Communist Party half a century ago, including what the Party had taken over from the I.L.P. They include so-called communists who support State capitalist China aaainst State capitalist Russia — or the other way round — and several brands of Trotskyists'.
So now the 'further left' organisations use against the Communist Party the fallacious arguments formerly used by that Party. For example, the Socialist Worker (published by I.S., now called Socialist Workers Party), in its issue of 27 July 1973, denounced the Communist Party's "parliamentary road to Socialism". This was on the ground that the working class cannot take control of Parliament through elections; that Parliament does not control the State machine, and that the State machine cannot be used to change the rest of society completely. That the Communist Party road is not one to Socialism is true enough; but criticism of the Communist Party has no bearing on the case for a socialist working class gaining control of Parliament. An astonishing statement by the S.W.P. in criticism of the Communist Party is that the working class would be out-voted by "the middle class and ruling class". As the working class constitute ninety per cent of the electorate (see section "What is Capitalism") they obviously do not understand who the working class are. And an article by Paul Foot, editor of the Socialist Worker (The Times, 14 August 1975) maintained that, as the Wilson Government had failed to do anything for Socialism, this proved that Parliament could not be used by Socialists — ignoring the fact that the Labour Government did not have and did not seek a mandate for Socialism from the electorate, and represents a Party which stands for the perpetuation of capitalism.
The 'Left-wing' organisations generally claim to be Marxist; but they interpret this to mean either the anti-Marxist policy of Lenin based on Louis Blanqui's doctrine of minority armed seizure of power followed by dictatorship, or the equally anti-Marxist doctrine which holds that the workers can revolutionise society without needing to control the State power. In the field of economics the 'Left-wing' organisations mostly reject Marx's analysis of capitalism in favour of the myth of the Keynesians: that capitalism can be operated without unemployment through "managed expansion of demand" — that is, through inflation.
Those who accept Keynesian doctrines cannot accept the Marxist explanation of inflation. The Communist Party of Great Britain in its October 1974 Election Programme attributed inflation to a variety of causes, including V.A.T., membership of the E.E.C. and armaments expenditure, with no mention of Marxist theory.
International Socialism (March 1974) gave as explanation "The present inflation is similar in many ways to the upsurge in prices, wages and interest rates which occurred at the height of the classical boom". The boom was by then already over and the depression had begun. In the depression prices rose faster than ever. On their theory prices ought to have been falling.
The other journal of the same organisation (Socialist Worker, 4 August 1973) gave a different explanation which supported the idea that wage increases "must have some effect on prices". "Of course they do. Quite simply, business raises its prices when increases in costs threaten its profit margins".
But whereas the C.P.G.B. ignored Marx, the Socialist Worker repudiated the Marxist explanation, under the impression that it is something invented by Mr. Enoch Powell.
"But Enoch Powell says it is all the fault of the government printing too much money. This is an illusion even shared by some on the left".
Statements of socialist principles and the Marxist conception of the classless socialist system of society to replace capitalism never appear in the propaganda of the 'Left-wing' organisations.
One crucial test for the 'Left-wing' organisations concerns their willingness to create confusion by urging the workers to support capitalism administered by Laboor government. At the February 1974 Genera Election the following organisations all told the workers to vote for Labour candidates.
Communist Party of Great Britam
International Marxist Group
International Socialists (now Socialists Workers Party)
Workers Fight
Workers Revolutionary Party
The Tory Mr. Enoch Powell was also telling the electorate to vote Labour!
The tactic of supporting one administration of capitalism against another on the ground that, on particular issues or in general, there are fine shades of difference, is a reactionary survival of the old practice of voting Liberal against Tory or Tory against Liberal. (During the second world war it led the Communist Party to support Tory candidates.)
Even if it achieved small temporary gains this would count for nothing against the harm done by encouraging the workers to believe that their interest can be served by placing in power the enemies of Socialism. On this ground alone, apart from the rest of the case against them, the so-called 'Left-wing' organisations have no claim to working class support.
Further Reading
The Dead Russians Society
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