by Chris Ford
Over two-hundred people attended the conference of the Labour Representation Committee held under the title of ‘The Future of the Left’. On the one hand the LRC conference took some very positive steps and on the other we had a full display of many of the negative traits of the traditional left.
In the debate on the storm raging in the global economy the motion from the Scottish based Campaign for Socialism was passed, in some ways reiterating last years policy that the “Left has not been able to win mass support for an alternative strategy” and “the LRC acknowledges that we need to construct the widest possible coalition of the Left, from within and beyond the Labour Party”.
The resolution from Lambeth & Southwark LRC bemoaned the lack of nationalisation, whilst rightly pointing out that the “The economic catastrophe provides the socialist left with both a challenge and a historic opportunity. We should not limit ourselves to measures designed to provide a softer landing to those affected by the economic crisis only for the system to be handed back when times improve to the rich and privileged elite in whose interests it has always operated.” They called for a campaign as large as the Stop the War movement around traditional left demands for extensive “democratic public ownership” and “a major programme of public works”.
These state-socialist conceptions were echoed by the resolution from the Trotskyist Socialist Appeal who said we must respond with the “the demand to nationalise the entire banking system, including the insurance companies”, along with other areas of the economy. Who are we placing this demand on?… well, the current capitalist New Labour government, who are expected to ensure that “industry should then be placed under democratic workers’ control and management”. Interestingly in the conference debate Socialist Appeal, when challenged what they meant by ‘workers’ self-management’, replied that they had not mentioned it. So they propose a version of ‘workers’ management’ in which workers do not manage by and for themselves…
This old slogan is an oxymoron: the idea Gordon Brown will place the banks under state control and in turn the state under the control of workers – which is the only way to understand nationalisation under workers’ control – is of course a complete impossibility. As a slogan to mobilise around it is in fact elitist and de-mobilising for it does not involve workers’ self-organisation or participation but the centrality of the state and a benign government from above. It is worth remembering when Socialist Appeal, then Militant Tendency, ran Liverpool City council in the mid-1980s they had every opportunity to introduce ‘workers control’ in the local state – they failed to do so, preferring to be the act as Marxist Managers of the City.
The comrades of Socialist Appeal in their resolution to place industry “under workers’ control and management” reveal a great deal of ambiguity and contradiction in the amalgam of state-ownership, workers’ control and workers’ management – which the International Communists consider to be three different things.
The motion from the International Communists, which was passed, can certainly assist in ironing out these ambiguities. Furthermore it commits the LRC to a definition of social ownership which rejects statist conceptions and supports workers’ self-management. The passing of the motion on social ownership and workers’ self-management is important in two regards – firstly it is the first time in three decades a body of the British labour movement has adopted such a policy, secondly it commits the LRC to develop these ideas through with its affiliates, LEAP and other organisations.
Whilst the motion was opposed by the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers Liberty and Stalinist New Communist Party, numerous delegates, including many who would disagree with us on other questions, expressed to our comrades a great deal of sympathy for these ideas and the motion. Genuine communists should welcome this LRC decision as an important step in the revival of the movement for workers’ control and self-management in our movement.
The other main debate was on workers’ representation, which became focused on a convoluted motion from the AWL with similarities to one submitted the previous year. Whilst at their own conference the AWL had decided they should learn the lessons of last year and seek allies before submitting a motion this year, in true sect fashion they paid no regard to these decisions. The whole was posed between the tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee positions of ‘reclaim the Labour Party’ and ‘create another Labour Party’. Simply recreating a model which has been a proven failure is hardly an alternative. This reduces the whole question of working class representation to standing in elections, further recreating the disastrous division of our movement into a political and industrial wing.
The appalling chairing contributed to the arid debate, with only AWL speakers being called in support of their motion and the Labour Party loyalists repeating that there was no alternative. The debate revealed a real lack of critical thinking on the part of the latter, with some comrades simply repeating fixed positions in a ritualistic manner with no regard to the fact their views are completely at odds with the outlook and experience of most members of the labour movement. At one point the CWU delegate ridiculously threatened that if the motion was passed they would break from the LRC and take their money with them. They were reminded the CWU have never made that threat to the Labour Party! In contrast the RMT and FBU have never behaved in such an undemocratic manner over the policy of the LRC.
Many of the LRC Labourite wing are fully aware that the capitalist Labour Party is beyond reclamation, and we need to create something else. Their opposition to electoral stunts however is being used as a crutch for intellectual sloth and actually working-out and creating that alternative. Even worse the debate revealed a real retrogression and isolationist trend amongst some of the Labour left, Jon Rogers arguing against the LRC being a bridge between the left in the Labour Party and those in the wider movement. For this trend the LRC is not so much a body to represent organised labour but a Labour Party left body which would be a sect.
The AWL motion was defeated and no doubt this may reinforce their own sectarian trajectory. Nevertheless the next RMT conference on January could possibly be an important arena of debate and should be built for with a view to addressing the real issue – the need for the re-composition of the labour movement as whole. This will be the perspective the communists elected to the National Committee will be arguing in the coming year.
the commune 
Is the term “traditional left” the Commune’s replacement for the AWLs “kitsch left” I wonder. One that defines you (as with the AWL) against everyone else – continuing the sect like tradition of your parent?
Chris Ford’s report that your resolution was “opposed” at the LRC was a bit misleading no one managed to speak against it – I had my hand up but wasn’t called. Let me steal from my report on the permanentrevolution.net website for a political criticism:
‘“the Commune” (a recent split from the AWL) made their debut with a semi-anarchist resolution on “social ownership and workers self-management”. They denounced “statist conceptions that have proved a historical failure” (presumably a reference to Marxist socialism) and declared that “The state is not a vehicle to achieve ‘socialism’”. Had they merely been talking about the capitalist state they would have been correct, but clearly they were referring to the state in general and the use of it by socialists. The point that needed to be made was that nationalisations have to be linked to workers control and, at a national level, to workers management and the fight for a workers government – to the need to smash the capitalist state and fashion a new one that is under the direct control of the workers organisations. ”
Any one who does not recognise the need for a workers state as part of the struggle for socialism and the transition to communism, is an anarchist not a marxist. If the commune wants to revive Bakunin all well and good, but its a bit strange to find you standing for the national committee of the Labour left LRC!
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Stuart writes that we
“denounced “statist conceptions that have proved a historical failure” (presumably a reference to Marxist socialism)”
Oh really? What examples of Marxist socialism in action were these? The “workers’ states”? Stuart has an article in the latest issue of his group’s magazine arguing that Cuba is a workers’ state even though the working class never took power, and it could have avoided bureaucratisation by spreading internationally… although quite why a bureaucratic coup finding echoes abroad would have introduced socialism is beyond me.
… “and declared that “The state is not a vehicle to achieve ‘socialism’”. Had they merely been talking about the capitalist state they would have been correct, but clearly they were referring to the state in general and the use of it by socialists. The point that needed to be made was that nationalisations have to be linked to workers control”
So the nationalisations are in fact carried out by… yes, the bourgeois state. And “linked to workers’ control”. What does this mean? Who would enact it, what does “linked to” mean, etc….?
… “and, at a national level, to workers management and the fight for a workers government – to the need to smash the capitalist state and fashion a new one that is under the direct control of the workers organisations.”
Workers’ management then means the control of the economy by a “workers’ government”, presumably a vanguard party in power. Like Socialist Appeal who at LRC stood up and said they were for workers’ management (like Hugo Chávez has enacted) but not for workers’ self-management.
Alas, Stuart omits from the quote here his mention on the PR site that a “significant minority” opposed the motion. Who were the minority? The Stalinists, Stuart and the AWL.
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David, you might do a better job if you come at this fresh in the morning, then you can answer the straight forward question:
Do you think the workers need a state, under their control, to establish socialism and build communism?
Or do you like Bakunin think the workers can smash the capitalist state and move straight to communism?
Clue: “Between capitalism and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” Karl Marx
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As you missed it Stuart here is something I said earlier. I think you will find it was Bakunin who used the term ‘workers state’ Marx. Marx was not for a ‘workers state’ as you and Bakunin term call it he was for the smashing of the capitalist state.
I think we should drop the term ‘worker state’ as it also has caused a lot of confusion over what the rule of workers involves and the creation of a new communist society. A workers republic at least put the sovereignty of the workers first a workers state can mean all sorts of things and mostly not self-emancipation of the workers.
Only once in The Class Struggles in France, did Marx described the self organisation of the workers clubs in these terms: “ And the clubs – what were they but a coalition of the whole working class against the whole bourgeois class, the formation of a workers’ state against the bourgeois state?”. He never returned to the term at all, rather the opposite, in 1874 in his polemic Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy his emphasis was on “collective ownership the so-called people’s will vanishes, to make way for the real will of the cooperative”, and that: “He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.” Marx argued against the anarchists’ elitism saying: “Will all members of the commune simultaneously manage the interests of its territory? Then there will be no distinction between commune and territory. The Germans number around forty million. Will for example all forty million be member of the government? Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune.”
The Paris Commune had had a great impact on Marx’s ideas, Engels writing on the 20th anniversary of the commune provides us with a refutation of the whole Party model of socialism-from-above, writing:
“The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organized men would be able, at a given favorable moment, not only seize the helm of state, but also by energetic and relentless action, to keep power until they succeeded in drawing the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. this conception involved, above all, the strictest dictatorship and centralization of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government.”
The Commune did the opposite posing instead of a centralised state “a free federation of all French Communes.” – And again:
“From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.”
Engels writes of a “shattering of the former state power and bemoans that “the superstitious belief in the state has been carried over from philosophy into the general consciousness of the bourgeoisie and even to many workers.” As for the Commune itself Marx himself was sharper, and made clear: “But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”
Marx did not for example ever talk of ‘nationalisation under workers control’ or nationalisation to then enact workers control. He writes “the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.” In the course of the revolution:
“Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune. ..The Paris Commune was to serve as a “the old centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers.”
As for the state, it was to be transcended replaced by unity “by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excresence.”
Marx defines the workers revolutionary organisation as a break with the modern state power,
“It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”
The Commune was “to serve as a lever” for uprooting the economic foundations of class society. Importantly Marx highlighted from the Commune the necessity of what we now term workers self-management and pointed to the need for the workers themselves to be in control: “If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control”.
None of this involves state-ownership as such, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme, which was buried by post-Marx Marxism of the Second International – was also clear on the cooperative form of communism. Marx here writes of “the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production”, where the “material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves”. This also relates to distribution in a communist economy which is not the centralised planning of state-socialist model which separates distribution from the production of the actual worker producers.
Marx explicitly attacks the idea of co-operative societies created by the “the state, not the workers” writing that “It is worthy of Lassalle’s imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!” For Marx such organisations are as the present co-operative societies “are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois”. This is not far from current demands for further nationalisation, with or without workers control. Marx ridicules the Lassallean who treated the “state rather as an independent entity” and the “riotous misconception it creates in regard to the state to which it addresses its demands”.
Marx asks the question as to the transformation which the state undergoes in communist society – that is what “social function will remain” that is “analogous to present state functions”. The important point is analogous not continuous – “This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word ‘people’ with the word ’state’. He could just as easily have said combination of the word ‘workers’ with the word ‘state’.
Tom cites Marx’s emphasis on the “political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” To quote Engels – “do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
In this debate you have more in common with the Lassalleans and the elitist conceptions of Blanqui than Marx’s conception of communism.
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Stuart puts two questions.
* Do you think the workers need a state, under their control, to establish socialism and build communism?
* Or do you like Bakunin think the workers can smash the capitalist state and move straight to communism?
I think Stuart reads the Marx/Bakunin debate wrong – which in any case is fairly confused. The difficulty is that Marx defines a state as an apparatus of class domination – i.e. by which one class suppresses another. Thus, any organisation through which one class exercises political dominance is a state. Thus, the organisation of the revolutionary working class, which would dominate the capitalist class in the process of any successful revolution, would be – and this is a matter of definition – a ‘state’. This is what Marx means when he uses formulations like the one I quoted.
From memory, in the Conspectus, Marx insists on his definition, oblivious to the idea that there might be others. Bakunin, meanwhile, does something similar with his definition – which is in fact barely a definition, but just a conventional ascription; a ‘state’ is something a bit like the governmental apparatus of modern society. As Chris says, on Marx’s definition (which is counter-intuitive, and not that useful in general discussion), the Paris Commune was a state, the sort of “workers’ state” Marx was in favour of.
Many ‘marxists’ go wrong when they more or less accept Bakunin’s working definition of a state – the lay, conventional one – and then imagine that Marx was advocating that the workers establish something like that in the social revolution.
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Given the normal meaning of “government” in the 19th century, which meant ‘regime’ or ‘constitution’ rather than ‘Cabinet’ or ‘ministry’, “a working class government” (Marx on the Commune) means something rather similar to “a workers’ state”.
That said, Chris is right that calls for “nationalisation” however much qualified with “under workers’ control/ workers’ management” are in substance Lassallean calls for action by the capitalist nation-state to support the *national* working class.
As *defensive* demands in relation to productive enterprises facing closure such slogans are unavoidable and merely demand that the capitalist creditors’ rights in insolvency should be overridden. As *offensive* demands they serve to promote nationalism and loyalty to the nation-state which is asked to protect us.
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What a load of guff. Let David and the Commune speak!
And check out this site, its really good: http://www.thecommune.com.au
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I also think that the accusation ‘sect’ should not be thrown around casually. If people are going to use it, they should say what they mean by that term exactly, and what groups are described by it. If you suspect that the AWL voted against the motion because of the needs of their organisation, not the wider class, then the proper thing to do is ask for an explanation of their vote.
It also seems a bit harsh to accuse them of being a ‘sect’ because they failed to build sufficient support for their motion this year. I think some of the strategic suggestions you’ve made are valid, but flawed strategy, or even lack of effort (and I have no idea whether this is the case) is not enough to make a group a sect. I suspect that the hard labour loyalists in the LRC are a very strong majority, not defeating them is no embarassment. Perhaps the thing to do would be to collaborate on a more comprehensive attempt in future.
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it’s pretty obvious that G.Brown & co aren’t going to do much that’s in favour of the workers at the moment, but it’s still correct to put demands on them in order to expose them in the eyes of those workers that have illusions as well as in order to be better able to put forward (at least elements of) an alternative, communist[ic] programme – i thought that was obvious!
steve revins
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The problem is that ‘putting demands on them’:
a) implies that they will, or even can, deliver on them – or that demanding that they do something, in however large numbers, has any relation to them actually doing it (and is hence a deceptive posture, and involves more mystification than ‘exposure’ of the role of the state); and
b) means that your ‘programme’ has to be couched in terms that are relevant for the forms of the contemporary liberal democratic state – and which are therefore premised on a central state managing and directing society.
It can still make sense to, for example, ‘demand’ that the NHS be retained in national ownership, because privatisation represents an immediate threat to patients and workers. And because the demand is not inconsistent with the basic nature of the state. What is not possible is that the capitalist state will institute communist economic forms.
If it’s obvious that the Brown government will act in a certain way, why don’t we just say that!?
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Stuart,
What a weird comment (yours of today 10.53, just below mine). Who’s preventing anyone from speaking? Comments on a blog are hardly a private conversation … and what has the fact a restaurant in Oz uses the commune name to do with anything?
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Stuart at least three comrades of the Group of International Communists have commented in this debate, Mike and other comrades are very welcome to post comments on our site.
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Obviously much like the “Traditional Left” the Commune has had humour bypass surgery.
Mike what makes you think my comment about ‘guff’ was referring to you?
I was trying to get David to answer a fairly straightforward question on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (DoP) and his attitude to it, but he seems to have gone to ground. Chris Kane’s long piece did not help because it did not answer the question. But as Chris seems keen on trading quotes from Marx and Engels lets give him a few.
The debate was about your idea that “the state is not a vehicle to achieve ‘socialism’”, enshrined in your resolution to the LRC. Clearly in the “clue” I gave to David from the Critque of the Gotha Programme, Marx refers to the DoP as a “state”. Marx suggested the Paris Commune as a model for the DoP. Engels in the introduction 20 years after the Commune says “This shattering (sprengung) of the former state power and its replacement by a new and truly democratic one is described in detail in the third section of the Civil War”.
So all these quotes clearly point to the state after the revolution being a vehicle to establish socialism.
Not enough? “The anarchists stand the matter on its head. They declare that the proletarian revolution should begin by abolishing the political organisation of the state. Yet the only organisation the proletariat finds ready made after its victory is the state. The state may have to undergo considerable changes before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a time would be to destroy the only organism whereby the victorious proletariat can make its newly won power valid, suppress the capitalist adversaries and carry through an economic revolution of society.” Engels in the M/E Works
And any honest reading of Marx’s the Civil War in France (as opposed to Chris Kane’s) shows that Marx has the same idea in relation to the Commune, “The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated (Marx was referring to the anarchists but it could be Chris Kane today), but were to be discharged by communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but on the contrary, to be organised by a communal constitution” – The Civil War in France.
Marx approved of the idea that the rural communes would “administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the national delegation in Paris”. They were to be revocable and elected by universal suffrage. So a constitution, a central government carrying out important functions, elections by the people – sounds like a state to me, one setting out to build socialism.
Lenin referred to this soviet type of state as a “semi-state”. But following Marx and Engels he declared in 1917 “The proletariat needs state power, a centralised organisation of force, an organisation of violence, both to crush the resistance of the and to lead the enormous mass of the population – the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians – in the work of organising a socialist economy.” State and Revolution.
I can hear Mike fainting in the background at the very thought but we should not forget the Paris Commune government had to organise violence against the counter-revolution – the 62 hostages headed by the Archbishop of Paris who were shot dead in response to the Versailles terror.
Maybe the Commune group hasn’t yet decided whether it agrees with the DoP – whether it sees a role for the state after the revolution. Maybe the statement in your resolution saying the state “wasn’t a vehicle for building socialism” was just a bad formulation? But how about a clear answer.
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But Stuart, your argument is that we ought to demand that the bourgeois state carries out steps towards socialism (nationalisations), to the extent that your group argues that nationalisation of the economy changes the class character of the state!
For example the claim that the nationalisation of more than 90% of the Cuban economy means that the Cuban working class holds power economically (and thus Cuba has a “deformed workers’ state”). Presumably “nationalisation under workers’ control” just means nationalisation, since you argue that if the economy is nationalised the workers are therefore in control… what a garbled “dialectic” PR have.
This argument is not about whether or not you term soviets as “a state” but rather the fact that ortho-Trotskyists like Stuart and his group identify state power as such with socialism.
I’m unsurprised you can uncover Lenin and Engels quotes supporting such a position.
By the way, what is the substance for your claim that we are Bakuninists? You just misrepresent the divisions in the First International… certainly Bakunin’s federations have nothing much to do with workers’ self-management.
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You write “Marx approved of the idea that the rural communes would “administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the national delegation in Paris”. They were to be revocable and elected by universal suffrage. So a constitution, a central government carrying out important functions, elections by the people – sounds like a state to me, one setting out to build socialism.”
That doesn’t sound like a state to me.
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Marx’s saw the self-organised working class as the vehicle for socialism not the state, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ or ‘federation of communes’ was that self-organised proletariat having conquered power , smashing the capitalist state and replacing it with their own organs of ‘self-government’ with the purpose of waging the ongoing struggle against the remnant bourgeoisie. In that sense it conducts functions ‘analogous’ to the state, but in its the process of creation of communist society – even in its lowet phase it is the negation of the state, it transcendance not its reconstitution in a new form. Sorry if that is not a simple answer but the dialectics of revolution are no matter how much you desire it a simple question with a simple answer. It is worth recalling it was Stalinism which in its revision or Marxism arguide that the advance to communism was the ‘strengthening of the socialist state’ – something its left opponents who lived under this enslavement always cited as proof of the non-socialist nature of the USSR. But of course you consider evidence it was a ‘workers state’.
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Chris I think you are too hung up on what is meant by a workers state. If the workers still need many functions of the state (which we would do), then in some form it is a workers state. The crucial question is whether centralisation of power would be needed (I think it would), rather than just saying federations are adequate. I can’t see, for instance, how 1000s of federations would be able to run an airforce or how production would be managed in the context of civil war.
Part of the problem with the resolution to the LRC, is that it could mean many things. But there is no way that the LRC have shifted politically that far overnight, however you read it, so the motion must have gone through without people in the conference realising the full conatations of what was being said.
In reply to David there is a qualitive difference between nationalisations and a revolution which brings about a planned economy. We talked about that a few weeks ago and seemed to end up going round in circles. But, for me, there is a clear difference.
Also the theory of a degenerated/deformed workers state (agree or disagree with it) does not say anything about the working class holding power. Indeed Trotsky described the caste that runs such states as akin to fascists.
Also can you try and move away from the pompous way that much of the far left debates. I mean “garbled dialectics”, who speaks like that?!?! The far left in the is country throws around insults and wraps it up as debate, we should try and move away from that.
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Sorry Dan, but the foundation of Trotsky’s and your position is that the working class “rules” economically in societies like the USSR, but that it lacks “political power”.
1936: “Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface – not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of leadership [“leadership” – sic!], were to collapse – which we firmly hope will not happen – there would remain an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than 10 years successes unexampled in history.”
From your own Degenerate revolution: “The expropriation of the bourgeoisie, the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the state, the state monopoly of foreign trade and the mechanisms of planification, represent historic conquests of the working class. They are the property forms objectively necessary for socialist construction. The absence of workers’ democracy, the monstrous bureaucratic tyranny does not alter this nor can it remove from communists the obligation to defend these gains and therefore the state that defends those gains. In any war with imperialism, we unconditionally defend the Soviet Union and other degenerate workers’ states.”
Stuart also wrote a fawning obituary of Cuban Trotskyist Celia Hart – http://permanentrevolution.net/entry/2296 – whose “Trotskyism” was limited to enthusiastic defence of the status quo. Even if she had been hostile to the brothers Castro (she wasn’t) her positions would have been fantastically limited. Just like Trotsky, who claimed that Stalinism was “the mortal enemy of communism”, but not state-socialism/centralised planning/clampdowns on workers’ control etc. as such.
On your other point, my use of the expression “garbled dialectics” was a sideswipe at the commonplace use of the term “dialectics” to mean “holding two counterposed ideas in your head at the same time”, in which the workers’ statists are expert.
Obviously the post-Trotsky Trots add another layer to this by making out that there need not even have been a workers’ revolution before the counter-revolution in order to imbue nationalisation with a socialist character.
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I really don’t get what you’re saying. Nothing in those quotes suggest that the working class rules. The degenerated/deformed workers state is ruled by the bureaucratic caste, as said in the second quote. Indeed the word “tyranny” makes this fairly clear. All that it is saying is that the economy isn’t capitalist and that a planned economy is a benefit that came from the revolution.
So are you against centralised planning and power after a revolution?
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Then why the term “workers’ state”? Trotsky says these are the gains of “socialist economy”.
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If the economy isn’t capitalist, then what is it?
Both in your own positions on Cuba, the Eastern Bloc etc, and Trotsky’s on the USSR, there is a quite clear identification of nationalisation with working-class economic power, counterbalanced by bureaucratic political power. Hence calling it a “workers’ state”. Of course, the post-1945 Trot position is cruder than Trotsky’s, particularly given the circular argument that it is a workers’ state because of the nationalisations, and the nationalisations have a socialistic character because there is a workers’ state… regardless of any dynamic of working-class struggle.
This is a pretty typical Trotsky quote on the matter, from 1938:
“The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation – not only theoretically, but this time, practically – of the theory of socialism in one country. The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”
So socially/economically there is a workers’ state (the possibility of 100% planning opened up by the revolution) but the bureaucracy puts this in danger and tends towards capitalist restoration. He can say all this despite the working class having absolutely zero economic OR political control in 1938.
In fact bureaucratic violence started soon after the revolution (1918-19 strikes were crushed, factory committees and soviets dissolved) and although enormously (enormously) heightened under Stalin’s rule, workers’ control measures were disenfranchised very early on.
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“If the economy isn’t capitalist, then what is it?”
It’s a degenerated/deformed workers state. The means of production are no longer capitalist, but they are not managed by the workers but by a dictatorial (brutaly dictatorial in some cases) bureaucratic caste.
And as said I think there is a difference between nationalised industries and a planned economy.
Of course a planned economy can have benefits in terms of production (although it can also have disadvantages), but that has nothing to do with workers having power over the economy.
It’s not that the bureaucracy just puts the planned economy in danger, it’s that the bureaucracy runs the DWS. And, as you say, the working class has zero control. This doesn’t contradict the theory of the DWS.
As said are you against centralised power/control after a revolution?
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You can always tell when someone is trying to avoid giving a direct answer – that write reams and try and take the discussion off at a tangent. Now David give us all a direct answer to a straight forward question:
Do you think the workers need a state, under their control, to establish socialism and build communism?
Or do you, like Bakunin, think the workers can smash the capitalist state and move straight to communism?
On Cuba I would be happier to engage when you write an article on your site, not only a critique of our position but on where you stand on defense of Cuba against imperialism and defending the workers gains stemming from the 1959 revolution.
But clearly someone who thinks that revolution was merely a “bureaucratic coup” needs to do a bit more reading on the subject.
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Why the separation between “socialism” and “communism,” Stuart? Marx and Engels didn’t make the distinction. They’re synonyms for the classless society. Yes, yes, “socialism” was the common term for the lower stage of communism in the 2nd International era. But you’re using it as synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat, a.k.a. workers’ state. That’s not how M&E used it. That’s not how we should use it either.
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No Jason, socialism and communism are not synonyms “for the classless society”.
Classes continue to exist under socialism, or the “first” or the “lower stage” of communism as Marx referred to it. Because classes (and the class struggle) still exist under socialism so does the state – to be precise the workers organised as the ruling class through their state – the dictatorship of the proletariat. (As made clear in all the quotes above from Civil War in France and Critique of Gotha Programme.)
Here’s another one: “The proletariat will use it political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State ie of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the productive forces as quickly as possible”. Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto. They then talk about the “higher stage” when class distinctions have disappeared and the state with them.
It wasn’t just the 2nd International, Jason, that recognised the distinction between socialism and communism, but Lenin, the revolutionary Communist International and every revolutionary marxist since. It was only the anarchists (and apparently their modern imitators of “the Commune”) who deny the distinction between these two stages, and deny therefore the role of the state “as a vehicle to build socialism” in this phase.
Anyway, where is David, and why hasn’t he given an answer to my straightforward question?
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The problem with your approach Stuart is that it is not a ‘straightforward question’ at all and it seems to me there are two questions one of which you don’t address which is the question of nationalisation by the existing state – the capitalist state. Which is confused with social ownership – this was a fundamental point we were addressing which has been clarified by the policy adopted by the LRC. You do not address this issue of the idea so common amongst Trotskyists that we demand that the capitalist state extend nationalisation, and even institute workers control. Do you agree social ownership is the same thing as state ownership by the existing state? Do you believe this UK state could carry out nationalisations and enact workers control? If so would it become a ‘workers state’?
I don’t see how making such ludicrous demands assists in developing a movement of self-emancipation, as opposed to generating consciousness of the working class position in society it completely confusing.
On your question do the workers need a state, under their control, to establish socialism and build communism, no they don’t. The Stalinists argued this but it has nothing in common with Marx’s vision of communism. The place of the state in the creation of communist society, from its lowest phase, is the start of process of its destruction and ingestation by society. The state, as we know it at present will simply not exist in a post-revolutionary society, even during the struggle with the capitalist class. The working class self-government or commune will continue certain social functions, analogous to it, including coercion against the former ruling class where necessary.
As Marx point “there will be no state in the present political sense”. As he said to Bakunin: “He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.” – Not Marx’s choice of words but if Bakunin wants to call it that – so be it if it makes it simpler to comprehend. But this authority, the Commune is something completely different which has transcended the present capitalist state.
What I am saying is that Marx’s citing of this back to Bakunin is perhaps no longer usefull in the 21st century and communists should consider dropping the term workers-state. Marx for a start never considered nationalisation or state property the defining characteristic of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the Commune.
Engels argued instructively that:
“Bakunin maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to blazes of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Do away with capital, the concentration of all means of production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall of itself. “
He did not say get rid of the capitalists and we can keep the state for its its a hallmark of a ‘workers state and a necessity for creating communist society! But the Stalinists did argue that the nearer to ‘communism’ the stronger and more powerfull will the state become. As far as I can see the State-socialists and anarchists have a lot in common – neither seriously believes the state can be transcended by communist revolution.
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Stuart: I didn’t set the discussion off at a tangent. Let me make it quite clear: setting up a new state is not necessarily needed. That has nothing to do with the Marx/Bakunin split, what a silly accusation you make.
So back to your group’s analysis of the state, i.e. that state ownership is in and of itself socialistic, hence your characterisation of the Eastern Bloc, Cuba etc.
Dan: if you can accept that workers have no control/power, what sense does it make to call it a workers’ state? “Degenerated workers’ state” presumably means workers’ state with bureaucratic degenerations… not that it is not a working-class ruled state at all. You can’t just change the meaning of these words.
If it is a d.w.s., then why not equally Guinea, Ba’athist Syria and Iraq, Algeria etc., which equally had the “gain” of planned economy, centralisation etc? What sort of “working-class conquest”, by the way, is neither brought about by the working class nor controlled by workers after its realisation?
Of course, if you think the Cuban coup d’état/putsch (for that is what it was: it had an explicitly bourgeois nationalist character, followed by a token holiday/strike which did not give its participants any further control, mimicking the strikes staged during the Stalinist coup in Czechoslovakia) and subsequent nationalisations show that the state is a vehicle for socialism, why not call for Britain’s present bourgeois government to enact “worker-controlled nationalisation?”. The workers’ control will consist of, as Socialist Appeal put it at the conference, “economic control by the government and TUC”.
How daft to insinuate that I or anyone else needs to prove we are not soft on a US attack on Cuba. Of course I am opposed to this. That has nothing to do with supporting the Castro brothers or the state-capitalist régime: I oppose an attack for the same reasons oppose all invasions and wars involving any countries, e.g. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The question is not “do you support Cuba”, “do you defend Cuba?” etc… Cuba is not a homogeneous block but a country divided by class antagonisms, and I do not support one country against another as if “Cuba” and “USA” or “Israel” and “Iran” were just the names of football teams.
Of course, much as Trotsky supported Stalin’s invasion of Finland (pretending that Finnish workers were establishing Soviets to welcome the Red Army…) Stuart is happy to support one government or régime against another, e.g. his support for the Iranian army fighting against the IDF or US Army.
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Stuart — your words only prove to me that Stalinist understandings of what Marx says regarding socialism and communism have impressed themselves on Trotskyist minds over the years.
Going by your logic there would be no reason not to call the Stalinist states “socialist.”
Ernest Mandel was one Trotskyist who got it right:
“Marx, Engels, Lenin and their main disciples and co-thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Bukharin et al. – incidentally also Stalin until 1928 – distinguished successive stages of the communist society: the lower stage, generally called ’socialism’, in which there would be neither commodity production nor classes, but in which the individual’s access to the consumption fund would still be strictly measured by his quantitative labour input, evaluated in hours of labour; and a higher stage, generally called ’communism’, in which the principle of satisfaction of needs for everyone would apply, independently of any exact measurement of work performed. Marx established that basic difference between the two stages of communism in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, together with so much else. “
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“I can hear Mike fainting in the background at the very thought but we should not forget the Paris Commune government had to organise violence against the counter-revolution – the 62 hostages headed by the Archbishop of Paris who were shot dead in response to the Versailles terror”. Excuse me?
Coming from Stuart who laughingly dismissed Communist Student propaganda calling for the militia as “ultra-left nonsense”. Your beloved ‘transitional method’ putting you not just to the right of Kautsky (who we supposedly embrace uncritically), but also a certain Eduard Bernstein!
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“Dan: if you can accept that workers have no control/power, what sense does it make to call it a workers’ state? “Degenerated workers’ state” presumably means workers’ state with bureaucratic degenerations… not that it is not a working-class ruled state at all. You can’t just change the meaning of these words.””
You might not like the term and not think it’s the best use of the term but the theory of the DWS does not mean that workers have any control. The reason it is called this is because the planned economy is still in place. The theory does not imply that workers have control, you are asserting something about the theory that is not the case.
The examples you give of wide spread nationalisation are simply not the same. I’ve already said that I think there is a qualitive difference between a capitalist economy that has wide spread nationalisations (such as the examples you give) and a planned economy that has come about through a revolution and is no longer a capitalist economy. We went round and round in circles about this the other day. If you think that the Cuban economy is the same as Ba’athist Syria and Iraq, Algeria etc I think you’re totally wrong, but no point going round in circles any more.
The other debate about whether to call the system after a revolution a workers state or not is symantics in my book.
The fact is that we would need centralised control over both the military and production. You can choose to call that a commune if you like but I think it’s a state, because its function is the armed oppression of one class (the ruling class) by another class (the working class). That function would not just disappear overnight.
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“Coming from Stuart who laughingly dismissed Communist Student propaganda calling for the militia”
Are people forming militias? How exciting. How can people sign up?
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Why does a planned economy signifiy anything inherently post-capitalist about an ecomomy, planning exists throughout capitalist society. It is a key feature of the stage of state-capitalism which emerged accross the globe in a myriad of forms from at least 1929 onwards. Nazi Germany had three year plans – was it a workers state without workers control?
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In terms of the Cuban economy an interesting quote from a BBC reporter:
“To get rich in Cuba you have to leave the island.”
And that about sums it up. All the other countries you mention are still part of the global capitalist system and individuals have no problem becoming rich. There really is no comparison.
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“To get rich in Cuba you have to leave the island”
Is hardly much of an insight into the relations of class exploitation in Cuba (or otherwise). Cuban workers have to sell their capacity to work to an employer, which in almost 90% of cases is the state, over which they have no control.
If the state is the organ for the exploitation of one class by another, which class rules in Cuba? If you said to someone in the street that it is a “workers’ state”, they would presume you meant that the workers control the state. Not that the workers have no power at all, but because of “planning” it is a workers’ state nonetheless. There is nothing socialistic about planning. Tesco plan. The Army plans. The only question is control and power: who rules? Why is there a qualitative difference between 70% nationalised economies (Syria, Algeria, etc.) and places like Cuba, where almost 90% is nationalised?
The fact that bureaucrats may not get loaded (although as it happens in, say, the USSR, wage differentials were enormous and top generals and managers/bureaucrats were multi-millionaires) does not mean there is not wage labour, exploitation, steep hierarchies, antagonistic classes etc. (that’s not a definitional explanation of state capitalism, but you get the point)
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The notion we make our demands contingent on what “people” are doing, let alone thinking, is precisely the problem with your narrow and economistic approach to Marxist political strategy and basic principles thereof.
If we do not patiently agitate around such fundamental propaganda over time then this is not exactly going to increase the likelihood of militias being set up is it? Hardly going to educate the most advanced section of our class! Ditto communism, working class rule.
You have to wonder what’s next comrades. Shall we become the “best fighters” for Strictly Come Dancing? Lots of people are doing that.
What I am pointing out here though is that while Bill and Stuart might foam at the mouth because Mike’s book talks of the strengths of certain aspects of the ‘Kautskyan centre’ (whilst highlighting their obvious flaws) aspects of their actual political practice are to the right of Kautsky and even Eduard Bernstein. Thus it is funny that Stuart then makes such a silly swipe at Mike. You can take the boys out of Workers Power…
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Is this Ben from the CPGB? If so I thought you had a bit more of a sense of humour than that! My comment about militias was meant as a light hearted joke, not a serious political point……….lighten up!!!
And don’t stop at Bernstein. I’d say PR are to the right of Tony Blair. Shoot ’em.
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Well it’s a minor commnet but I do think it shows the qualitive difference between the Cuban economy and the others you mentioned.
As for workers having no control, again we agree, so why keep going over that point?
Cuba is run by a bureaucratic caste, which is different from a ruling class in a capitalist country. But that doesn’t in anyway imply that this is good for the working class in terms of living condition, just that there is the benefit of having a planned economy in place if they are overthrown. And a planned economy is not the same as planning under capitalism!
A planned economy would be the bed rock of an economy after a revolution. Comparing this to Tescos is ridiculous. The theory of the DWS isn’t saying that those countries are socialist, it is saying that a planned economy is still in place, simple as that really.
The difference between the two types of economy is the ones you mention are still capitalist economies. Cuba isn’t.
And no-one has denied that bureaucrats were/are privaliged but they are not the same as a ruling class. No ownership, no inheritance etc
As for wage labour, do you seriously think that won’t exist for a while after a revolution?!
But we are just going round in circles now.
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So moving on:
The other debate about whether to call the system after a revolution a workers state or not is symantics in my book.
The fact is that we would need centralised control over both the military and production. You can choose to call that a commune if you like but I think it’s a state, because its function is the armed oppression of one class (the ruling class) by another class (the working class). That function would not just disappear overnight.
PS “N*zi Germany had three year plans – was it a workers state without workers control?”
If you’re going to debate like this, debate is pointless.
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Dan, you are just asserting that Cuba is non-capitalist and therefore that there is a difference, without explaining why. Similarly, your continued assertion that the degree of nationalisations (70% vs. 90%) is a crucial/qualitative change, even though admitting workers have no control. The fact that planning (in terms of collective decision making) will always be necessary, regardless of social relations, does not mean that centralised state planning is progressive when workers have no control of it.
You think it offensive to make comparisons with Nazi Germany, but I see no reason why not to compare those things which fascist and Stalinist régimes have in common. Certainly it shows that there is nothing particularly socialistic about planning as such. Your justification for saying these places are workers’ states is totally circular: Cuba is a workers’ state because of the planned economy; and the planned economy is unlike capitalist planning because it has a workers’ state…
Marx’s 1844 manuscripts: writing that estranged labour and private property are inseparable, he writes that a wage rise/equality imposed from above would make society an abstract capitalist:
(1) Political economy starts out from labour as the real soul of production and yet gives nothing to labour and everything to private property. Proudhon has dealt with this contradiction by deciding for labour and against private property[21]. But we have seen that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour with itself and that political economy has merely formulated laws of estranged labour.
It, therefore, follows for us that wages and private property are identical: for there the product, the object of labour, pays for the labour itself, wages are only a necessary consequence of the estrangement of labour; similarly, where wages are concerned, labour appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of wages. We intend to deal with this point in more detail later on: for the present we shall merely draw a few conclusions.[22]
An enforced rise in wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that such an anomalous situation could only be prolonged by force) would therefore be nothing more than better pay for slaves and would not mean an increase in human significance or dignity for either the worker or the labour.
Even the equality of wages, which Proudhon demands, would merely transform the relation of the present-day worker to his work into the relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.
Wages are an immediate consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the immediate cause of private property. If the one falls, then the other must fall too.
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See here for why it’s not capitalist:
http://www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=category&cat=36
Lots of articles.
There not being any profits is a fairly important factor though…….
Also there is a difference between nationalisations (however many) and a planned economy. The economies you have mentioned still operated in the world capitalist economy in terms of making profits.
Also you seem to mix up planning with a planned economy. I’m saying that after a revolution there would need to be a planned economy i.e. centralised control of production. And also central control of the army.
I never said stalinist states were progressive.
I don’t think it’s offensive to make comments about N*zi Germany (if I write this word without a star it doesn’t seem to let me comment!). But I think it’s a ridiculous way to debate. N*zi Germany was a capitalist economy with huge multinational firms and profits.
Can we now turn to this:
The other debate about whether to call the system after a revolution a workers state or not is symantics in my book.
The fact is that we would need centralised control over both the military and production. You can choose to call that a commune if you like but I think it’s a state, because its function is the armed oppression of one class (the ruling class) by another class (the working class). That function would not just disappear overnight.
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Thank God Ben and the CPGB have arrived on this list to give us lessons in revolutionary strategy – where would we be without them?
In fact Ben, I (and PR) are even more right wing than you suspect. You know, astonishingly, we are not at the moment calling on the workers to call a general strike, take to the barricades, form militias and start the insurrection. Are you?
And indeed I might have expressed my opinion in a pub that in your local or parliamentary election in Wales it was a piece of “ultra left nonsense” to call on the electorate to form armed militias – and I was right. If Communist Student is currently calling on students and the NUS to do the same at the moment, that is also a piece of ultra left nonsense. But I must say I didn’t see you raising this demand at freshers – did I miss it?.
Ben, when you learn something about the relation between programme and tactics, agitation and immediate slogans, and how they relate to the various stages of the class struggle, then you can come back and lecture us on “revolutionary strategy”.
On a more weighty point, I think Chris Kane is the only person to have seriously addressed the question about the role of the state after the revolution, and its role as “a vehicle to build socialism”. But Chris has a problem. It is quite clear from all the quotes I have given (and to anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Marx’s writings) that not just Engels but Marx as well saw the state as a crucial weapon in the struggle for socialism after the revolution. To avoid clashing with Marx or Engels on these questions Chris has to pretend they never said it – he is in denial.
He then has to pretend that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is not really a state, that it may have functions “analogous to a state” (like the organisation of armed force to repress the bourgeoise – pretty analogous don’t you think!) but is merely “self government”. Unfortunately that awkward old Marx kept calling it “a State” – he even gave it a capital letter in the Communist Manifesto so you wouldn’t miss it!
This method is why I referred to your “semi-anarchist resolution”. The anarchists in fact have a much better and more coherent position than the Commune does. They know what Marx says on the state and they attack him for it. They are clear that the socialist revolution abolishes the state right away and we organise ourselves the day after on communist principles in a stateless society.
Give me the rigid (and sterile) logic of the anarchists any day to the incoherent and slippery politics of the Commune on the state.
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Stuart it is a distortion of post Marx Marxism that has equated the Dictatorship of the Proletariat with the state when in fact the very very few times Marx used the term he simply meant the rule of the working class and certainly not a distatorship in the modern sense of the word. What you dont seem to graps is that the dialectical transformation taking place with the state in the lower-phase of communism. You seem to see it as simply a change of the people running the state and using it for different means.
Furthemore you do not answer my question about your attitude to the existing capitalist state?
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Stuart your characterization of the demand as ultraleftist was not confined to an election in wales, I seem to remember the same argument being made in socialist alliance, a position you seem to still defend. Ironically the demand formed one of the points of disagreement between Trotsky and elements of what would become the “petit bourgeoise opposition.” of the swp
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It is a bit of a tangent from the main discussion, and for that I apologise. But I just wanted to answer Stuart quickly.
No, Communist Students does not call on British workers, students or the NUS to arm themselves now and form militias. So no, you won’t have seen us doing this at freshers fairs, and neither is that what Ben was getting at here.
There is a difference – and you really should know this – between making propaganda, in the here and now, for the necessity for the working class to arm itself and make revolution, and actually calling on them to do so now.
We do not call on workers to arm themselves now, but we do make propaganda, and try to win people to the idea, now, that working class militias are a historical necessity if we are to make a successful revolution. We don’t dodge the argument in the here and now in other words.
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SOCIAL OWNERHIP – WORKERS SELF-MANAGEMENT? I would be interested to hear some thoughts on what the core of the policy was addressing.
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I agree with you Dave on the making propaganda argument. But the rather jokey discussion in a pub after a few beers was about the CPGB’s platform in a local or parliamentary election somewhere in Wales.
Some members of the CPGB are fond of quoting (or rather misquoting) comments made in pubs or on the streets. It is not a very useful (or honest) method of polemic when there is plenty of written down positions that they can take up.
As for the Socialist Alliance, perhaps “n” can come up with the amendments we (then Workers Power) moved to the platform People Before Profit, I haven’t got them to hand.
Well at least Chris now recognises that Marx referred to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a state “a few times” – this is progress. But clearly Chris would like us to believe he really didn’t mean it – slip of the pen maybe?
Chris asks me to answer his questions on nationalisation:
Do you agree social ownership is the same thing as state ownership by the existing state? Answer: No
Do you believe this UK state could carry out nationalisations and enact workers control? Answer: No
If so would it become a ‘workers state’? As the existing UK state/Govt wouldn’t – Answer No
The nationalisation of N Rock was a state capitalist measure – not dissimilar to the 45-48 nationalisation of the railways, mines etc. Taking over clapped out or bankrupt firms, at the taxpayers expense, re-equipping and selling them off again clearly has nothing to do with socialism – its why the Economist argued right from the beginning for the new Labour govt to nationalise N Rock.
But, unlike the anarchists, we do believe in placing demands on the bourgeois state. In this case for the expropriation by the state without compensation of bankrupt firms, key industries and banks and their placing under the control of the workers. Such demands could only become a reality (in whole or part) if fought for from below by a militant fighting workers movement – and are linked to other demands and slogans: for workers occupations, workers defense guards, general strikes, building workers councils and fighting for a revolutionary workers government.
If a revolutionary workers government carried out nationalisations under these conditions it would be both revolutionary and a prelude to civil war with the capitalists. Which is why such a government, to be worthy of the name, would have as its first task the arming the workers and the workers councils and encouraging the ranks in the army to disobey orders, establish soldiers committees etc etc
Hope this answers your questions Chris.
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And here’s me thinking that spotty students had stopped debating such things in such ways – what a load of absolute tosh. Except for the odd comment from Dan, that is!
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Stuart I certainly do not say that “Marx referred to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a state “. I really think you have great difficulty understanding the dialectic of negativity which underpins Marx’s whole approach to the state and the communist revolution.
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”unlike the anarchists, we do believe in placing demands on the bourgeois state. In this case for the expropriation by the state without compensation of bankrupt firms, key industries and banks and their placing under the control of the workers. Such demands could only become a reality (in whole or part) if fought for from below by a militant fighting workers movement – and are linked to other demands and slogans: for workers occupations, workers defense guards, general strikes, building workers councils and fighting for a revolutionary workers government. If a revolutionary workers government carried out nationalisations under these conditions it would be both revolutionary and a prelude to civil war with the capitalists. Which is why such a government, to be worthy of the name, would have as its first task the arming the workers and the workers councils and encouraging the ranks in the army to disobey orders, establish soldiers committees etc etc”
So Stuart, what you are arguing is basically that we should demand that the bourgeois state enact nationalisation under workers’ control, knowing that it won’t, and in the hope that the struggle for this will create a totally different set of circumstances (the masses having become disillusioned with the government), in which the realisation of a totally different demand would be possible.
Why not just say what we are for and fight for it ourselves? And what do you say when the government (or regimes like Cuba’s) takes state capitalist measures off its own back?
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Well I musts admit Chris, I’ve always had a problem of getting to grips with the “Dialectic of negativity”. Is that the Athusserian/Psycho-analytic concept, or one from Gerry Healy?
Is it one of those dialectics that allows you to prove by selective quotations that the pope is not a catholic and that Marx and Engels did not believe the state was a necessary vehicle to build socialism?
David I explained what I thought of state capitalist nationalisations above. Our demands don’t change, nor is it impossible for the bourgeois to except widescale nationalisations under workers control. In extremis the bourgeoisie will accept almost anything to save its own skin, to live to fight another day, to launch a counter offensive at a later date. I would have thought all this was the ABC of socialism.
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“I explained what I thought of state capitalist nationalisations above.”
That you approve of them? Or that you think that the Cuban bourgeois state nationalising 90% of the economy makes it (like a larva into a butterfly) a workers’ state (i.e. not state capitalist)?
“Our demands don’t change, nor is it impossible for the bourgeois to except widescale nationalisations under workers control. In extremis the bourgeoisie will accept almost anything to save its own skin, to live to fight another day, to launch a counter offensive at a later date. I would have thought all this was the ABC of socialism.”
I agree that it’s the ABC of socialism. So why the “transitional demand” which has no transition to anything? I totally agree that the state could enact endless nationalisations (although it would only be able to submit to workers’ control, not introduce it for us once we campaign hard enough!)… so why do you write “Do you believe this UK state could carry out nationalisations and enact workers control? Answer: No”. Maybe you will say “enacting workers’ control” is in fact the task of the “workers’ government”… but if that is what you mean, your position/writings are hopelessly confused and self-contradictory and a meaningless use of the expressions “this UK state” and “workers’ control”.
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It seems you’re getting the run around from an honest ultra leftist like Stuart, who at least has some grasp of programmatic issues, orientation to workers struggles and real experience in the labour movement. Even on the state he’s asking you the right questions
Maybe you should have listened in (AWL) class more.
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I’ve just read the 50+ comments here and all I can say is that i want to commit suicide.
David B and Chris K, you two need to stop quoting Marx so much and learn to argue your case on your own terms.
To the PR lot, you guys need to get some clearer terminology. Unclear terminology can either hide unclear thinking or cause it.
This article was originally about the LRC conference, so why don’t we get back to something a little more on topic? I have a few questions for Stuart King. You voted against the motion proposed by the commune (URL at the bottom of this comment). How did it feel to be to the right of the LRC conference, who voted by 90% to adopt this motion. Can you explain what is in that you oppose? To whatever PR comrades are still reading this thread: do you oppose this motion? If so, why?
Finally, I’d just like to say that both of you lot (That is both the commune and PR) sound like a bunch of fundie Christians quoting different parts of the Bible at each other to win an argument. It has been a truly pathetic spectacle to see Monty Python’s Peoples’ Front of Judea/Judean Peoples’ Front joke demonstrated in real life.
I’d say grow up but you’re all older than me, so whats the use?
https://thecommune.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/motion-to-lrc-conference-on-workers-self-management/
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Paul: so no substantiation for your point… just Trots banding together. How very uninteresting.
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The point is, that if you are going to present yourself to the labour movement as some kind of political tendency, you should at least answer some basic questions about the world.
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I am not sure what points you mean? Futhermore contrary to the defamation most of us have extensive experience in the trade union movement going back decades. As a young organisation we have been pretty sucessfull in projecting our ideas. We do not claim to be a ready made revolutionary elite with ready made answers to the worlds problems. A sure sign of revolutionary pretensiousness and in fact irrelevence.
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Always proud to be called an “ultra left” by the right-wing AWL.
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Not an AWLer, but there are worse insults.
Chris, What about the state?
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Paul, what about the groundless defamation and abuse?
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Stuart’s right to press David Broder on the need for a workers’ state. David comments, after running about for a while: “Let me make it quite clear: setting up a new state is not necessarily needed.”
Which, to be honest, is a little less than “quite clear”. When would such a state be needed? When not?
Quite straightforward questions. Answer please.
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The means used to defend/extend working class power will come about organically and in given circumstances, so sorry I can’t give you a blueprint. As I argued in the thread which arose after my review of Mike Macnair’s book Revolutionary Strategy, I do not believe that there is some grand lesson of history showing us that networks of soviets/workers’ councils/factory committees or whatever could not hold power themselves.
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I dont think anyone from the International Communists has argued the working class does not need a government and an authority, an a number of comrades have tried to explain, with great difficulty the transcendance of the state.
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“I do not believe that there is some grand lesson of history showing us that networks of soviets/workers’ councils/factory committees or whatever could not hold power themselves.”
Sorry? So, this isn’t a state? It exists below state level?
But then Chris states the working class needs a government, an authority… But not a state? A “network” might be OK? How does a state differ from a network? And when would a network do, but a state would be unnecessary?
Are you not expecting ruling class resistance? And if you are, isn’t a workers’ state, erm, rather a good idea..?
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“Are you not expecting ruling class resistance? And if you are, isn’t a workers’ state, erm, rather a good idea..?”
Is a workers’ militia a state?
Is a factory committee/workplace committee a state?
Are armed workers’ councils a state?
Why? Are they a state before the bourgeois state collapses? If not, why the change?
Marcus recently wrote on this site that he supports Iran’s (read: the Iranian régime’s) right to pre-emptively strike against Israel and the USA, which gives me the impression that he does not exactly have libertarian views of socialism/communism and of class struggle.
So, Marcus: is Cuba a workers’ state? Are you in favour of a “workers’ government” presiding over the existing state bureaucracy? Please explain your own position more fully.
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This whole repetitive and tiresome debate began over disagreement with our motion on self-managemenent and social ownership – which none of our critics seem to want to discuss – perhaps to avoide revealing too much of their anti-workers self-management attitudes – and instead move onto the post-revolutionary order. Thats fine we should discuss what happens after the revolution – before the revolution. But I dont think we should dislocate it from what we do it present to realise the communism latent in the current struggles of workers. Further I raised the idea communists should consider dropping the term ‘workers state’ due to the confusion it causes over the nature of the communist revolution. Which has been all the more confirmed by this debate. My point on this is not new, indeed Engels made a similar point four years after the Paris Commune – let me repeat it as cited by Lenin in State and Revolution:
“One of the most, if not the most, remarkable observation on the state in the works of Marx and Engels is contained in the following passage in Engels’ letter to Bebel dated March 18-28, 1875. This letter, we may observe in parenthesis, was, as far as we know, first published by Bebel in the second volume of his memoirs (Aus meinem Leben), which appeared in 1911, i.e., 36 years after the letter had been written and sent.
Engels wrote to Bebel criticizing the same draft of the Gotha Programme which Marx criticized in his famous letter to Bracke. Referring specially to the question of the state, Engels said:
“The free people’s state has been transferred into the free state. Taken in its grammatical sense, a free state is one where the state is free in relation to its citizens, hence a state with a despotic government. The whole talk about the state should be dropped, especially since the Commune, which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. The ‘people’s state’ has been thrown in our faces by the anarchists to the point of disgust, although already Marx’s book against Proudhon and later the Communist Manifesto say plainly that with the introduction of the socialist order of society the state dissolves of itself [sich auflost] and disappears. As the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore propose replacing the state everywhere by Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well take the place of the French word commune.” (pp.321-22 of the German original.)[3]
It should be borne in mind that this letter refers to the party programme which Marx criticized in a letter dated only a few weeks later than the above (Marx’s letter is dated May 5, 1875), and that at the time Engels was living with Marx in London. Consequently, when he says “we” in the last sentence, Engels undoubtedly, in his own as well as in Marx’s name, suggests to the leader of the German workers’ party that the word “state” be struck out of the programme and replaced by the word “community”.
What a howl about “anarchism” would be raised by the leading lights of present-day “Marxism”, which has been falsified for the convenience of the opportunists, if such an amendment of the programme were suggested to them!
Let them howl. This will earn them the praises of the bourgeoisie.”
I know how Lenin feels.
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David Broder asks, “Is a workers’ militia a state?”
“Is a factory committee/workplace committee a state?”
Does anyone apart from David not know the answer? David, I’m slightly embarrassed: no they’re not. With all due respect, your views seem a little undercooked…
Chris: this would be the Lenin that wrote the State and Revolution? That proposed the workers should have a state to protect their, erm, revolution? The Lenin that helped consolidate a state. That advocated a gvt. that was not suspended in mid-air a long way above a ‘network’ of factory cttes, but firmly rooted on soviets.
Anyone would think that you were trying to twist Lenin to suggest that a state was not needed! By chopping a quote which only suggests that Lenin objected to some German socialists’ misrepresentation of Marx… Chris! You are amongst friends, let us debate without this sort of messing about!
Workers’ state seems fine to me. Spelling out that the workers must have … umm, a state.
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“David Broder asks, “Is a workers’ militia a state?”
“Is a factory committee/workplace committee a state?”
Does anyone apart from David not know the answer? David, I’m slightly embarrassed: no they’re not. With all due respect, your views seem a little undercooked…”
Quite obviously the questions were rhetorical, quite obviously these things are not states… sorry you didn’t get the message.
Yet a militia is an organ of repressing the bourgeoisie/counter revolution, and a workplace/factory committee can be an organ of working-class authority and power. So what does it mean to insist that workers need a “state” to exercise these functions?…
(Nor do I accept that a soviet representing such functions is in any meaningful sense a state… although, I said earlier, I would estimate from other things you say that you believe that Stalinist states are “workers’ states”.)
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Yet again here is Engels wrote with whom I agree:
“The whole talk about the state should be dropped, especially since the Commune, which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word.”
and again
” We would therefore propose replacing the state everywhere by Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well take the place of the French word commune.”
Marcus, what point to you think Engels is making, what advice do you think he trying to give our movement? Read the words for what they say not what you want them to say.
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This discussion is extremely inane, Marcus has joined half way through and is just regurgitating the same stuff again and again.
The question seriously posed is what we want to create and, tied to that, how we think it should come about.
Those who insist that we need a workers’ state, simultaneously arguing that Stalinist states are in some form “workers’ states” are not merely mouthing abstractions but risk repeating so many past errors.
This approach to politics – determining what we should do not through the prism of the real activity of the working class but rather through vehemently insisting on the value of old dogmas and hand-me-down theories – is shown in its full logic by the idea of supporting the Iranian régime in a war against the USA/Israel. That just has no connection with practical politics or the tasks of the workers’ movement. It is unreal.
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David B: “militia is an organ of repressing the bourgeoisie/counter revolution”. Urm, yep. But a local militia is inadequate when facing, for example, an invasion.
“The question seriously posed is what we want to create and, tied to that, how we think it should come about.” Indeed, and people on this thread ‘regurgitate’ because you’ve not spelt it out. You’re all over the place and people are trying to pin you down.
The point that the workers’ state is a semi-state in the sense that it is in the process of withering away, shouldn’t be used to ditch the whole thing. Baby, bathwater.
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Chris Kane said, “Paul, what about the groundless defamation and abuse?”
What do you mean by this exactly?
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I mean the statement that “It seems you’re getting the run around from an honest ultra leftist like Stuart, who at least has some grasp of programmatic issues, orientation to workers struggles and real experience in the labour movement.”
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If that amounts to defamation and abuse, then god help you.
Unless you mean Stuart isn’t honest…..
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So who are you claiming has no “real experience in the labour movement”? Or did you just throw that in for the sake of it? Why dont you concentrate on the subject and avoide irrelevency.
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”Indeed, and people on this thread ‘regurgitate’ because you’ve not spelt it out. You’re all over the place and people are trying to pin you down.”
What do you want him to do? Draw up a blueprint?
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Experience in labour movement struggles is relevant to making judgements about political slogans, demands and so on, so it is not an irrelevant point.
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