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Weekly Worker 574 Thursday April 28 2005
Vote for class independence
Mike Macnair revisits the question of the popular front
lan Daviss response (Weekly Worker April 21) to my article
on popular fronts (Weekly Worker March 31) attempts to defend the International
Bolshevik Tendencys view that it is unacceptable to call for votes for
the candidates of workers parties which are engaged in a popular
front policy. The argument is murky, because it is dependent on rather
slippery quote-mongering and fails to address my basic historical objection to
the IBTs line: that Trotsky argued, at precisely the time that the French
and Spanish peoples fronts were campaigning for office, that the
Trotskyists should enter the Socialist Parties in order to link up with left
opponents of the peoples front project. Rhetoric and citation-grazing Throughout his article,
comrade Davis characterises the IBTs view as their opposition to
the popular front, the idea being to imply rhetorically that any other
policy is not opposition to the popular front. However, popular frontism is in
the last analysis merely a particular form of class collaborationism, or the
pursuit of, to quote comrade Davis, the common interests of
the workers movement and a section of the capitalists. The Labour
Party, for example, even when it has been at its most leftist, is a
class-collaborationist party. It has been a class-collaborationist party since
before its formal foundation as an individual membership party in 1918, in the
collaboration of the trade union bureaucrats and most of the parliamentary
labour representatives in the war effort in 1914-18. If comrade Davis
is right in the meaning he attributes to opposition, then Lenin and
Trotsky did not oppose Labours class-collaborationism, but on
the contrary endorsed class collaboration when they argued that the
early British communists should fight for affiliation to the Labour Party and
support the Labour leaders as a rope supports a hanged man.
The quotations comrade Davis relies on to support his view of
Trotskys policy are selective, and the background position, developed by
the Spartacists in the 1970s, is a systematic historical falsification. He must
know this: the point was convincingly demonstrated by Ian Donovan in his 1998
article, still up on the website Revolution and Truth
(http://members.aol.com/RevolutionTruth/popfront.htm). The IBT never answered
comrade Donovan. Instead, comrade Davis relies on a brief 1987 exchange between
the IBT and Workers Power (in Trotskyist Bulletin No3, available at
www.bolshevik.org). I do not propose to repeat comrade Donovans
researches into Trotskys approach in the 1930s and the output of the
Spartacist school of falsification in the 1970s. The reason is that at the end
of the day it is perfectly possible that Trotskys approach in the 1930s
was wrong, and the question has to be addressed as one of theory and evidence
rather than citation-grazing. I will, however, add only one quotation to the
pile, this time from Lenin in Leftwing communism: Prior to the
downfall of tsarism, the Russian revolutionary social democrats made repeated
use of the services of the bourgeois liberals: ie, they concluded numerous
practical compromises with the latter. In 1901-02, even prior to the appearance
of Bolshevism, the old editorial board of Iskra (consisting of Plekhanov,
Axelrod, Zasulich, Martov, Potresov and myself) concluded (not for long, it is
true) a formal political alliance with Struve, the political leader of
bourgeois liberalism, while at the same time being able to wage an unremitting
and most merciless ideological and political struggle against bourgeois
liberalism and against the slightest manifestation of its influence in the
working class movement. The Bolsheviks have always adhered to
this policy. Since 1905 they have systematically advocated an alliance between
the working class and the peasantry, against the liberal bourgeoisie and
tsarism - never, however, refusing to support the bourgeoisie against tsarism
(for instance, during second rounds of elections, or during second ballots) and
never ceasing their relentless ideological and political struggle against the
Socialist Revolutionaries, the bourgeois-revolutionary peasant party, exposing
them as petty-bourgeois democrats who have falsely described themselves as
socialists (emphasis added). In other words, in duma elections
the Bolsheviks called for a second-round vote for the Cadets, the main
bourgeois liberal party, as opposed to the monarchists. Lenin is not
exaggerating for effect here: the historians confirm it. In Whither France?
Trotsky quite correctly points out that this sort of limited agreement
(episodic agreements and compromises, confined strictly to practical
aims) is not the same as the programmatic bloc represented by the
peoples front
(www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936/witherfrance/03.htm). But neither
is calling for votes for opportunist and class-collaborationist parties, while
explicitly denouncing their opportunism and class-collaboration, the same as
endorsing the peoples front. Again, Lenin may have been wrong. But the
IBTs position has to stand or fall on its own merits.
Theory When a
bourgeois-workers party appears before the masses as part of a
joint party with the bourgeoisie, the IBT wrote in its exchange with
Workers Power, it explicitly renounces any claim to stand for the
political independence of the workers. For the duration of the bloc, the latent
contradiction embodied in such a formation is suppressed. A vote for the
workers component of a popular front is a vote for the
one party of the bourgeoisie. This general
theoretical statement in the 1987 text purports to summarise a 1936 passage
from Max Shachtman, which in fact makes no such claim. As an account of
Trotskys position it is wholly without support in Trotskys
writings. On the contrary, in Whither France? Trotsky precisely argued that the
mass votes for the Socialist and Communist Parties in 1936 expressed rising
class consciousness among the workers, which the SP and CP then
handed to the Radicals: Nevertheless, even under
these conditions the masses were able to give expression to their desire: not a
coalition with the Radicals, but the consolidation of the toilers against the
whole bourgeoisie. Had revolutionary working class candidates been run on the
second ballot in all the electoral districts in which the socialists and the
communists withdrew in favour of the Radicals, they would, no doubt, have
obtained a very considerable number of votes. It is unfortunate that not a
single organisation was to be found capable of such initiative. This shows that
the revolutionary groups both in the centre and locally are lagging behind the
dynamics of the events, and prefer to temporise and evade whenever it is
necessary to act. This is a sad situation. But the general orientation of the
masses is quite clear
(www.marx-ists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936/witherfrance/03.htm).
Once again, the fact that it is Trotsky writing this does not make it true. The
question is: are there grounds for the IBTs view independent of its
falsified interpretation of Trotskys position? Or does theoretical
analysis lead to another conclusion? Class political
independence The elementary political ideas of Marxism are dead
simple. Marxists insist that there is a fundamental antagonism in society
between the capitalist class and the working class. Hence, on the one hand, as
long as the capitalists still hold the political power, they will use it
against the working class: any concessions made to the working class will be
taken back as soon as the capitalists are pressed by a long downturn in the
economy leading to intensified competition. The working class therefore needs
to organise for political action to take the political power out of the hands
of the capitalists, and to begin the process of the socialist reordering of
society and overcoming private property and the state. On the other
hand, Marxism claims that all forms of socialism which are not based on the
working class taking the leadership of society - utopian, ethical, christian,
islamic, green, and so on - are dead ends. This is partly because they leave
untouched the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital. It is partly
because they endeavour to preserve and promote the petty property rights and
independence of farmers, small businesses and intellectuals and
managers: and these petty property rights and independence
naturally give rise both to capital, and to the bureaucratic-coercive
state. The idea that the working class needs class political
independence - its own party based on its own interests - is therefore utterly
central to Marxism. Marx and Engels spent their lives after the defeat of the
1848 revolution fighting for nothing less - which led them to fight for an
international movement, reflecting the international character of the working
class as a class, and against Lassalles efforts to tie the workers
movement to the national state. They also fought for nothing more: and
therefore against tying the workers organisations to the particular
panaceas of Proudhon, Lassalle or Bakunin, among others; but equally against
Hyndmans efforts to make a particular dogmatic version of Marxism into a
minimum basis for a party. Of course, there is a lot of theory behind
these conclusions - and the question of how to get there also poses more or
less complex theoretical problems. But the central ideas are simple.
The peoples front rests on the ideas that the divide between the
people and the monopolies (in modern terms the
multinationals), or between democratic capital and
fascist capital, or national capital and
comprador capital, is more important than the fundamental division
between labour and capital. It therefore entails repudiation of the basic ideas
of Marxism. Thus far comrade Davis is right (and he is not saying anything
different from what I said in my March 31 article). The working class can only
defend its interests effectively if it does not subordinate them to alliances,
which will inevitably prove to be no more than temporary, with sections of
capital. Class alliances On the other
hand, society does not consist only of the working class and the capitalist
class. The middle classes are different in the advanced capitalist countries
from those in the less developed countries: fewer peasants and artisans, and a
larger intelligentsia/managerial class. But they are still there. Nor are the
other classes, as the Lassalleans claimed, merely one reactionary
mass. So even if the working class had organised itself into a
mass workers party with the goal of taking the political power away from
the capitalist class, it would still need to seek to lead - which implies
making compromises and partial alliances with - sections of the middle
class. The working class needs to take the lead in society. So at this
level the question posed is not one of blocs with parties. It is what
programmatic compromises with the distinct objective interests of the petty
proprietors are consistent with the working class struggling to lead the
society. This is the issue discussed in Engelss The peasant question in
France and Germany. Engels argues, for instance, that it is acceptable for the
workers party to promise the peasantry that a workers government
will not expropriate their holdings, or that it will offer limited protection
from certain sorts of fraud practised by the capitalist banks, etc on the
peasants. But it is not acceptable to promise the peasantry that their holdings
will be protected from competition or subsidised, or to promise peasants (or
artisans/small businesses) exemption from the demands of the workers on issues
of wages and conditions. Bourgeois and
petty-proprietor parties The capitalist class is small relative
to the size of modern societies. It could not govern the society without the
support of the middle classes. This seemingly simple point is
reflected in the character of capitalist parties. No party anywhere
- or, indeed, at any time since the rise of capitalist states - stands for
election on a promise to represent the interests of big capital, as opposed to
the workers and petty proprietors. Nor is there such a thing as a mass party
whose activist base is mainly capitalists. Rather, capital rules through the
petty proprietors. A bourgeois party is just a petty-proprietor
party which has got big enough for the major capitalists to try to control
through financial backing, media support, promises and threats - and which is
willing to succumb to these blandishments. The various brands do
not reflect different class fractions. Rather, they represent
different ideological strategies for making an alliance between the capitalist
class and the petty proprietors (and, in some cases, the top layers of the
working class): democracy, religion, social conservatism,
nationalism, populism ... A bourgeois party is just a petty-proprietor
party which has got big enough to allow the capitalists to govern through it.
The converse of this is that, even supposing the existence of a mass
workers party based on class independence, there can be no
petty-proprietor party which forms the basis of a class coalition
between the workers and a section of the petty proprietors on more than a
short-term basis. Making an alliance between the workers and a section of the
petty proprietors means winning a section of the petty proprietors to support
the workers party, not a strategic coalition with a petty-proprietor
party or parties. This does not mean that the workers party can
do without tactics towards the petty-proprietor parties or temporary blocs and
agreements with them. To refuse all such blocs and agreements would be to
insist on political impotence and an inability to intervene in actual political
life. But the key here is that these are tactical agreements between strategic
opponents. They do not imply a cessation of hostilities but - as Lenin wrote in
the passage quoted earlier - agreements for limited common action on the basis
that the political battle between the workers party and the
petty-proprietor parties continues even during the common action.
The line of least resistance Class-political
independent organisation of the working class is a difficult path. It offends
the general expectation in capitalist society that the workers are subordinate
to the capitalists (and the middle classes expectation of a higher status
than the workers). The capitalist state actively resists it. In this
situation the line of least resistance is what Gramsci called a
corporatist approach. That is, that the working class claims
representation as a subordinate group, within the framework of the nation, the
constitution or some other petty-proprietor ideology, or that it aspires to
overcome class division: ie, to reduce the superficial appearance
of class division without overcoming its material basis, the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie. The result is not just mass working class support for
bourgeois or petty-proprietor parties, but also a tendency for workers
parties themselves to be incorporated within the bourgeois-party game by
adopting leaderships and politics which subordinate the working class to the
state, or to alliances with bourgeois parties, or whatever. We are now familiar
with the phenomenon of workers parties like the Labour Party
and many others, which can function as instruments through which the capitalist
class governs. When Lenin called the British Labour Party a bourgeois
workers party he meant something different, but the term is
convenient and useful. But there are many more petty-proprietor workers
parties: ie, ones which are committed to one or another form of
petty-proprietor ideology, but are not large enough for the capitalist class to
seek to govern through them. The root cause is the fact that this is
the line of least resistance. Consequently it is utterly familiar that when a
genuine political crisis develops and the masses begin to break with simple
support to their governors, they turn first to parties committed to
petty-proprietor ideologies. It is a smaller step to take than the step of
grasping the idea of class-political independence all in one go. Thus, for
example, the first phase of the Russian Revolution saw a massive growth of the
Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. This is all the more true in
the situation which has actually prevailed as a result of the course of the
20th century: the workers parties created in the time of the Second
International were captured by allegiance to the bourgeois states in 1914-18;
the communist parties, created to fight for class political independence under
these conditions, were captured by the Soviet bureaucracy, which was a segment
of the petty proprietors; the petty-proprietor Stalinist ideology of national
roads, party monolithism and the peoples front has captured most of the
small groups to their left. As a result, the groups and individuals who
genuinely fight for class political independence are everywhere small and
scattered. Dynamics and contradictory
votes On this basis it should be possible to see why a vote for
a class-collaborationist workers party can have a
contradictory character - depending on the immediate political dynamics. It is
undoubtedly a vote for class collaboration. But it can also and simultaneously
in the same individual voter be a vote for class independence. The class
collaborationists present themselves, sometimes very strongly, sometimes in the
most attenuated fashion possible (as in the Brownite shift of
Labours 2005 election campaign) as political representatives of the
working class. They do not thereby cease to be class collaborationists. A vote
for them may be merely a perceived vote for the lesser evil, like a Democrat
vote in the US. But it can express a partial, incomplete and contradictory
aspiration to class political independence. This, I take it, is what the IBT
mean by the latent contradiction embodied in a
bourgeois-workers party. The task of the advocates of
class-political independence (Marxists, communists) is to find the road to
develop this contradiction, to break from the class-collaborationist leaders
those who aspire to class political independence but do not yet understand it.
This is the ground of communist electoral (and other) tactics towards the
Labour Party. The problem is how to dramatise the fact that the
class-collaborationists claim to represent the interests of the working
class is, in fact, inconsistent with their class-collaborationism. Yes, comrade
Davis, contrary to your sneers about tactics, this is a tactical problem.
Are popular fronts different? The IBT
comrades insist that popular fronts are somehow different and worse than the
class-collaborationism of the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers party:
remember, a workers party through which the capitalist class
governs us. In the name of avoiding the touch of pitch of
popular-frontism, the IBT comrades prettify the class-collaborationist social
democratic parties. They are somehow better because they are based on the
organisation of the working class (1987 exchange) or reformist
workers parties that draw a crude class line electorally (Davis
article). But this is a complete misconception. The Labour Party was founded in
1918 against the communists. It was founded on loyalty to the British state and
led by people who had loyally supported feeding the European workers into a
mincing machine in 1914-18. Its loyalty has been rewarded: since 1945 it has
been one of the two poles of British bourgeois politics, and has governed -
1945-51, 1964-70, 1974-79, 1997 to date - in the interests of imperialist
capital. A vote for Labour is a vote for class collaboration organised through
the relation between Labour, the trade unions and the British state.
Here - contrary to comrade Daviss assertion - the IBTs position is
by no means unique. Reject popular frontism - vote Labour is the
Alliance for Workers Libertys approach to Respect. But an
unqualified vote for Labour in 2005 is a vote for the working class
collaborating with the British state in British imperialisms war on Iraq
... and all the rest of the New Labour crap. A vote for Bliar is a
vote for the British imperialist state and British imperialist capital. But
there is nothing new here. A vote for Wilson, for Attlee, for Macdonald, for
Henderson was the same. The truth is that social democracy and
popular-frontism are different forms of class collaborationism, but they are
both class collaborationism nevertheless. There is no difference in principle.
Both a vote for a social democratic party and a vote for a social democratic or
Stalinist party engaged in a peoples front are in slightly
different ways votes for class collaboration. Both are equally capable of also
and contradictorily expressing an aspiration to class independence.
Where there is a difference is in the appropriate tactics towards them. In the
case of the peoples front, the class collaborationism of the
workers parties is expressed by the presence of phantoms of the
bourgeoisie in the front and their veto over the fronts policy. It
is easy to dramatise our rejection of this class collaborationism by focusing
on our opposition to the candidates of petty-proprietor parties and movements.
In the case of the social democracy, class collaborationism is expressed in
relation to the nation and the state power. Focusing on this question is more
difficult. It involves selecting contemporary issues which critically express
the choice between loyalty to the nation-state and loyalty to the international
working class. In the 2005 general election we - the CPGB - have
chosen the question of the Iraq war as the way to focus this question. Other
elections would imply other choices. Respect On the scale of British politics as a whole
Respect is a small and unimportant phenomenon. It is what, in my March 31
article, I called an unpopular front: one in which a small
communist party (here the Socialist Workers Party) uses popular frontism to try
to give guarantees to the trade union and Labour lefts that if you will
get into bed with us we wont threaten your
class-collaborationism. Given Respects marginality, it
would be defensible in principle either simply to give support to all Respect
candidates (because the SWPs imagined alliance with islamists is utterly
marginal to the main character of Respect as an SWP front and to the overall
dynamics of British society, and a vote for Respect is really a vote for the
SWP), or to reject Respect altogether (because it is merely a sectarian front
for the SWP). The trouble with these approaches has three aspects. The
first is that the British Marxist left needs to reassert the fundamental
politics of class independence after a century which has been dominated by
social democratic and Stalinist class-collaborationism. The second is
that British Marxists need to learn how to handle popular frontism when it
appears on a larger scale than Respect (which it undoubtedly will when the
present two-party polarity does begin to break down more seriously than it has
so far). The Oehlerite sectarianism of the IBT and similar groups, and the
pro-Labour pseudo-class politics of the AWL, will be worse than useless in
those circumstances. So will any tactic based on critical support
for the peoples front as a whole which does not attempt to draw the class
line between the candidates of workers organisations and the phantoms of
the bourgeoisie. In this sense our line on Respect for the 2005 election is
preparation for future and more serious peoples front projects.
The third is that, while Respect is small and unimportant on the scale of
British politics, the SWP has to date survived, while the other, relatively
large organisations of the British far left - the old official
CPGB, Militant, Workers Revolutionary Party and International Marxist Group -
have fallen apart or got much smaller. The result is that the SWP, and hence
Respect, is large and important on the scale of the British Marxist left.
Respect is, hopefully, a culminating stage in the SWPs evolution towards
official communism and peoples frontism, which began in the
late 1970s with the Anti-Nazi League. If we are to save as many SWP members as
possible for class politics, we need tactics towards Respect which express
sharply the character of this evolution and attempt to draw the line between
class independence and class collaboration. Propaganda group? IBT
comrades have argued in the past that this line would be appropriate to an
organisation which regrouped a large part of the workers
vanguard (the layer of working class activists, currently scattered among
the trade unions, the Labour Party, the left groups, and various local and
single-issue campaigns and projects). But we are a small propaganda group,
whose task is to win forces to true Marxism away from the existing
fake left. This requires us to make our positions utterly clear and
sharp: to use an expression which CPGB comrades have employed, to make
angular polemics; to use one common on the far left, to bend
the stick. We can only achieve this, they say, by outright rejection of
popular frontist projects like Respect. The AWL has made very similar arguments
against the CPGBs positions both on Respect and on Iraq. As
applied to these issues, this is an utter misconception, and one whose
consequences would be tragic if they were not so ludicrously trivial. It is
true that the CPGB, the AWL and the IBT are all small propaganda groups and
that our press is read overwhelmingly by existing activists of the left. This
is reflected in our case by the choices we have made about the character of the
Weekly Worker. Comrade Davis quotes Trotsky as saying - wholly
correctly - that communists must speak the truth to the masses, no matter
how bitter it may be. The problem with angular polemics and
bending the stick is that it precisely risks not telling the
truth. James Robertson of the Spartacists in the 1970s wanted an
angular polemic with the other Trotskyists, and hence came out with
the line: no support to workers parties engaged in a popular front. But
to justify this line the comrades had to adopt both a theoretical falsification
(the idea that the contradiction in class-collaborationist workers
parties is suppressed by the peoples front policy) and a
historical falsification: the falsification of Trotskys views in the
1930s by selective quotation, continued in comrade Daviss article.
Sean Matgamna sought to bend the stick against the fake
left or kitsch left over Iraq and Galloway. The result is
that the AWL has bought on a large scale the spin put out by the media
operations of the British and US states and continues, for the sake of its
line, to peddle the bizarre idea that imperialism set out to bring bourgeois
democracy to Iraq and that the imperialist troops protect the infant
Iraqi workers movement. Both are examples of allowing the
desire to create clear red water between the politics of the small
propaganda group and its larger rivals to lead to distortion and
falsification. Yes, comrades, tell the workers the truth. The truth
about Respect is that a vote for Respect is a vote for class collaboration -
because it is a vote for the SWPs alliance of Marxists and
islamists. It is simultaneously a vote for class independence - because
it is a vote against subordination to the British states war in Iraq.
Communists argue for a vote for working class Respect candidates to drive that
contradiction towards class political independence. The truth about
Labour is that a vote for Labour is also a vote for class collaboration - both
because of the whole history of Labour, and because Labour is right now in
government. It is simultaneously a vote for class independence - because Labour
is still the trade unions party, still calls itself Labour,
and so on. Communists argue for a vote for anti-war Labour candidates to drive
this contradiction towards class political independence. |