The Politics of the SWP

THE POLITICS OF THE

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A TROTSKYIST CRITIQUE

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The politics of the SWP

A TROTSKYIST CRITIQUE

Introduction 2 STATE CAPITALISM: A TRAVESTY OF MARXISM

Call that socialist? 4 POLAND 1980-81

Solidarnosc challenges for power 10 POLAND 1989

Solidarnose takes the power 12 NEITHER WASHINGTON NOR MOSCOW

View from the third camp 14 AFGHANISTAN

On the side of reaction 20 THE SWP AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

A parody of Leninism 22 TROTSKYISM AND THE SWP

Would Trotsky have joined the SWP? 26 THE SWP AND ECONOMISM

What is to be done? . . . the question economism can’t answer 30 FROM DOWNTURN TO UPTURN

New mood, same politics 36 THE SWP AND THE POLL TAX STRUGGLE

No strategy to win 37 THE TRADE UNIONS

Syndicalism and the bureaucracy 39 THE NHS STRIKES

A crisis of leadership 46

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP *

Introduction

largest groups on the British left, began the

1990s in an optimistic mood. With Thatcher in trouble over the Poll Tax the party decided it was time to “go for growth”.

Such optimism is to be welcomed. But what many newer recruits to the SWP won’t know, and what longer standing members may have forgotten, is that only a few years ago the party was in the grip of a self-defeating pessimism. The SWP’s politics, for most of the 1980s, was dominated by the perspective of the “downturn”.

The move towards the current optimism and away from the preceding mood of doom and gloom represents yet another dramatic shift in the perspectives and orientation of the SWP. Such shifts are characteristic of the entire history of the SWP and of the International Socialists (IS), its forerunner. The leader of the SWP, Tony Cliff, likes to

Ts Socialist Workers Party (SWP), one of the

justify such 180 degree turns as “bending the stick”

jn the face of new developments. This is a far cry from the truth.

The zig-zags of the SWP are not tactical responses to changed circumstances in the class struggle on the basis of a consistent Marxist strategy. They are a series of ill conceived political gyrations, inevitable for a group that lacks real programmatic ballast. The situation in the real world is made to fit the requirements of the SWP leadership’s latest schema for the growth or preservation of the party.

Politically, these lurches by the SWP, first one way and then another, have in general bred opportunism, in the form of “economism”. That is, the SWP accommodate to the existing level of the struggle, failing to challenge the leaders of that struggle and give it a revolutionary direction. Occasionally, however, it has led the party to present a “left” face and indulge in sectarian binges. In both vanants the remarkable thing is that the SWP never advocate anything other than a set of minimalist, if militant, demands and tactics—most of which are already being fought for by the workers in any case,

In the 1970s the IS cut with the grain of working class militancy but refused to challenge the reformist political limitations of such militancy or the political prejudices of many workers on issues such as racism, sexism and lesbian and gay rights. After the election of a Labour government in 1974 the party attempted to hold the ground it had made by consciously “steering left”. Systematic work in the unions was increasingly subordinated to building party fronts like the Right to Work Campaign. Instead of challenging the reformist leaders the SWP set its supporters off on marches around the country and lobbies of TUC congresses, which

2 WORKERS POWER

ended up with them kicking the shins of the bureaucrats rather than politically challenging their misleadership.

On other issues too, the SWP veered wildly. From militant anti-fascism, culminating in the Battle of Lewisham in 1977, the party retreated in the face of a media campaign, into a popular frontist campaign, the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), which organised rock concerts instead of physically confronting the fascists. From disregarding the centrality of women’s liberation the SWP became prominent activists in the thoroughly feminist and objectively reactionary anti-pornography campaign, “Reclaim the night”. After declaring “the party” in 1976 and standing against Labour in the period before 1979, they became Labour's undemanding supporters at the election. Their mass party perspective was quietly shelved.

In the course of all of these sharp turns the IS/ SWP preferred to bureaucratically rid itself of internal opponents rather than honestly account for the problems with their politics and perspectives. Hundreds of people—including the Left Faction, the forerunner of Workers Power—were expelled simply for raising differences. This process went on and on, and was particularly intense in the period between 1973 and 1979, until the party was thoroughly purged of many of its leading cadre. The Central Committee was, by these means, guaranteed that its past mistakes would not be called to account and that its future policy swerves were unlikely to generate any opposition.

Then came the justification for the SWP’s failure to become the mass party in the 1970s, and its excuse for not trying to become it in the 1980s— the “downturn”. This perspective is the perfect alibi for Cliff and the other SWP leaders. It begins in 1975, the year when the SWP’s period of growth from a tiny propaganda group into an organisation 4,000 strong with roots in the working class came to an end.

And now, they claim, it is beginning to give way to a “new mood” of confidence inside the working class, just at the point when the SWP are recording their best rates of growth for many years. How convenient that the entire class struggle can be understood and categorised according to how well or badly an organisation is growing, especially one which, by the SWP’s own admission, is not a major factor in the class struggle.

From all of this we can see that the SWP’s view of perspectives has little in common with Marxism. Theirs’ are perspectives framed for the benefit of the party, not the class. They are designed to justify the latest turn of the leadership, not equip the members with revolutionary answers to take into the real class struggle.

What holds the SWP together through all of these chops and changes is its adherence to state capitalism. This theory, which claims that the USSR and the degenerated workers’ states are capitalist and that the bureaucracy is a collective capitalist class owning and controlling the entire economy, is the fundamental basis of the SWP’s politics. It was over this issue that Cliff split from the Fourth International at the end of the 1940s. It remains the distinctive and unifying theory of the party. Whatever the tactical twists and turns it engages in all members can still agree on this theory.

State capitalism explains how the SWP has been able to establish international links with other left groups with whom, at many other levels, it has profound disagreements. Its international co-thinkers all agree that the USSR is a capitalist country and are content to unite with the SWP on that basis alone. The SWP is a profoundly national centred organisation. Its internationalism does not consist of a serious attempt to refound a revolutionary International on the basis of a common world programme. It is scornful of such efforts and has repeatedy argued that until there are mass parties in a number of countries any efforts directed towards constructing a revolutionary International are doomed.

This lack of active internationalism means that it is no problem for it uniting with other groups despite major differences. The SWP itself reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the British la-

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bour movement. Its syndicalism and economism are the manifestations of its adaptation to Britain’s traditions of trade union militancy. Its fraternal organisations reflect different national pressures and often pursue very different tactics to those the SWP would endorse.

Indeed throughout the history of its “international” work the SWP has coquetted with groups with a Maoist and even guerillaist orientation (the PRP-BR during the Portugese revolution for example). So long as they all agree that the USSR is state capitalist these differences are relegated to secondary issues by the SWP. Each national group gets on with its own work and international democratic centralism is not even considered.

The SWP’s whole approach to perspectives, party building and to the construction of an International demonstrates their inability te advance a consistent and coherent Marxist strategy. The twists and the turns flow directly from their refusal to develop such a strategy, to anchor their politics in a revolutionary programme.

Marxism has a word for such a method—centrism. The SWP are a centrist organisation. In every sphere of politics this is clear. In this pamphlet we demonstrate the different ways in which, at different times, the SWP’s centrism has revealed itself. We appeal to all those members of the SWP who read the pamphlet to discuss its contents with us; we appeal to all those who agree with us to’ join us.B .

The Trotskyist Manifesto

A new transitional programme for world socialist revolution

Entirely faithful to the method of the Transitional Programme, the Trotskyist Manifesto builds on the lessons of the last fifty years of struggle to re-elaborate Trotsky's earlier work. The programme of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International is available in paperback priced £3-45 inc p&p from: Workers Power, BCM 7750, London WC1IN 3XX

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 3

Call that socialist?

Tony Cliff's theory of state capitalism lies at the very centre of the Socialist Workers Party’s politics. Since 1950 Cliff's tendency has defined itself against

others on the international left mainly over the argument that the USSR, China and Eastern Europe are “state capitalist” societies.

In the face of the momentous crisis wracking Stalinism since 1989 Chris Harman has argued that “.. . this theory alone can make sense of the otherwise bewildering

events of the last few months, pointing to future options both for the world’s ruling classes and those of us committed to fighting them”(ISJ 46). Mark Abram contests. this claim and shows why state capitalist theory fails.

question that comes back at Trotskyists when

they try to explain how and why the USSR and Eastern Europe are “degenerated workers’ states”.

Our answer is simply, no. The USSR is not socialist nor moving towards socialism. It is a society where the workers took power in 1917 and took the first steps of transition towards socialism.

There was no possibility of building socialism in one country, especially in one as backward as Russia. Lenin and Trotsky believed that if the USSR remained isolated and revolutions in the advanced west failed, then the first workers’ state would be overthrown and capitalism would return.

The revolution did remain isolated. But instead of succumbing to counter-revolution from outside the Soviet working class fell victim to a different kind of counter-revolution from within; the new Stalinist bureaucracy seized political power and crushed all forms of workers’ democracy.

At the same time it massively extended and consolidated the property relations established by the Soviet dictatorship in the early years after 1917.

Industry, which had been nationalised in the 1918-21 period, was greatly enlarged in a series of Five Year Plans, starting in 1929. Private property on the land was liquidated, as were millions of peasants themselves. The threads of agricultural and industrial production were pulled together into the hands of centralised planning agencies that directed resources between different sectors according to the political criteria set by the new conquering bureaucrats.

Trotsky described this whole process as a political counter-revolution. The social relations established by October 1917 had not be overthrown. But workers’ power—the only thing that could employ these relations in the service of transition— had been crushed. The result was a degenerated workers’ state.

S: you think it’s socialist? This is the stock

4 WORKERS POWER

Cliff was not the first person to claim that Russia was state capitalist. From the very beginning of its life “left communists” and Mensheviks claimed that the USSR was, and could never be anything other than, state capitalist.

But Cliff’s theory attempts to stand by the early experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and by Trotsky’s fight against Stalin. Even today Cliffs followers claim that “state capitalism” is based on Trotsky’s method and that today Trotsky would be a proponent of state capitalist theory.

It is the inability of the SWP to fully grasp the significance of the transition period under the dictatorship of the proletariat which is the single most important methodological error that lies at the heart of the theory of bureaucratic state capitalism. For revolutionary Marxists the dictatorship of the proletariat necessarily ushers in a transitional period.

The central task facing the working class in that period is to gradually transform property relations, social life and political power so as to make possible the creation of a communist society. In the transition the productive forces must be massively expanded in order that a society arises which can “inscribe on its banner: from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”. (Marx) Gradually, to the degree social antagonism disappears the working class itself disappears, for the proletariat “is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite ... private property.” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works Vol 4 p36)

In the field of politics the dictatorship of the proletariat under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky faced three tasks. First the suppression of counter-revolution which was carried out ruthlessly during the civil war period (1918-21). Secondly, this workers’ state, based on soviet power, encouraged the widest democracy of the toilers, recognising that for socialism to be built progressive measures had to be taken to ensure the withering away

of the state as a separate power. Thirdly, in order to create the material conditions of a communist society and to ensure its very existence the Soviet Republic had to be an instrument for internationalising the revolution. Ultimately the working class can only be victorious on a world scale.

Lenin and Trotsky recognised the impossibility of an immediate leap out of backwardness. The Soviet dictatorship destroyed the bourgeoisie’s rule and ushered in a period of economic transition in which the working class would have to fight to eradicate the forms of capitalist production, exchange and distribution. As Marx had said:

“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerged.” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

Marx presumed that, for example, remuneration for labour would still take the form of wages which in the early transition would represent exactly what each individual worker had given to society. Bourgeois right or capitalist forms of distribution would inevitably operate in the workers’ state so long as the economy remained impoverished and scarcity was generalised. Only the conscious effort of the workers to progressively raise labour productivity and increase productive wealth could undermine the continued operation of such forms inherited from capitalism. Economically, the key task facing the Soviet workers after 1917 was the subordination of all elements of capitalism—commodity production, ‘profit, law of value, wage inequalities, money-~-to the mechanism of democratic planning. The creation of statified property was a necessary means to that end.

However, even in the hands of a healthy workers’ state, statified property does not have, in the immediate aftermath of the proletarian revolution, an automatically socialist character. This is determined by whether or not the direction of the property relations is towards the triumph of conscious s.anning and the creation of socialism. As Trotsky said:

“The latter has as its premise the dying away of ute state as the guardian of property, the mitigaxun of inequality and gradual dissolution of the iviperty concept even in the morals and customs xX society.” (Writings 1935-36 p354)

== turn, this triumph can only occur at all if the wcea<ers are democratically organised to exercise =te7 own power. Only the self-emancipation of the warecng class can guarantee the transition to socialism. Because of the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy—itself a product of Russia’s material backwardness and the isolation of the first workers’ state—the transition to socialism was blocked in the USSR. Trotsky himself was the most intransigent opponent and analyst of the degenera-

tion of the Russian Revolution. He recognised the material forces that shaped that degeneration:

“The upsurge of the nationalised productive forces, which began in 1923 and which came unexpectedly to the Soviet bureaucracy itself, created the necessary economic prerequisites for the stabilisation of the latter. The upbuilding of the economic life provided an outlet for the energies of active and capable organisers, administrators and technicians. Their material and moral position improved rapidly. A broad, privileged stratum was created, closely linked to the ruling upper crust. The toiling masses lived on hopes or fell into apathy.” (Writings 1934-35 p175)

The developing Stalinist bureaucracy lashed out first against the communist Left Opposition, crushing it by 1928, Over the next five years it crushed the restorationist right wing around Bukharin, es- © tablished a bureaucratic command economy and destroyed each and every remnant of proletarian democracy. By 1927 the political defeat of the working class at the hands of the Stalinist clique was complete. Yet in the process of creating this Stalinist Bonapartism the economic foundations created in the aftermath of destroying capitalism were not only preserved but actually extended on a massive scale, with the liquidation of the Kulaks and the extension of the planned economy. Stalinism’s contradictory character reveals itself in its political expropriation of the Russian proletariat and its extension of bureaucratic planning to all the major elements of the post-capitalist economy. Against the proletariat Stalinism is counter-revolutionary in that it strangles the only force that ean effect the transition to socialism. But it does it on the basis of property relations that have a postcapitalist character. It is this dialectical understanding of Stalinism’s contradictory nature that completely eludes each and every state capitalist theorist.

IF IT IS NOT SOCIALIST, IS IT CAPITALIST?

Cliffs method of analysing the class nature of Stalinist Russia has nothing to do with Marx’s dialectics. He compares the reality of Stalin’s Russia with the norms of a healthy workers’ state in transition towards socialism. In fact he sums up his own method well when, after discussing Marx and Lenin’s programme of proletarian democracy, he continues:

“To this conception, let us now counterpose the reality of the Russian Stalinist state.” (State Capitalism in Russia, 1974 p96)

Not surprisingly Russia fails Cliffs normative tests. Of course, the USSR is not a healthy workers’ state and neither is it socialist. But it is impossible to deduce the class character of a staze =: contrasting it with programmatic norms. Trias. himself warned his critics:

“In the question of the social] character = 2-- USSR, mistakes commonly flow, as we ma.< 272

THE POLITICS OF THE SP <

ously stated, from replacing the historical fact with the programmatic norm.” (in Defence of Marxism, New York, 1973, p3)

A revolutionary method of analysis does not counterpose “norm” to “fact” but seeks to analyse their contradictory unity:

“The programme of the approaching revolution in the USSR is determined on the one hand by our appraisal of the USSR as an objective historical fact and on the other hand, by the norm of the workers’ state. We do not say ‘Everything is lost, we must begin all over again.’ We clearly indicate those elements of the workers’ state which at the given stage can be salvaged, preserved and further developed.” (ibid)

Using his own method Cliff is only able to prove that Russia is not socialist and not in transition to socialism. So what? Trotsky said that first and with far greater clarity. But Cliff, and hundreds of SWP educational meetings, leap from the evidence that Russia is not socialist, to that claim that it is therefore capitalist.

In order to prove Russia is capitalist the Cliff school has had to mangle the very meaning of capitalism and its laws for the Marxist tradition. Cliff applies his own formalistic, non-dialectical method to the sphere of political economy too.

The case for calling Russia state capitalist essentially rests on the nature of the accumulation process in the USSR. For the SWP this argument is used to explain how, why and when capitalism was restored in the USSR. Cliff interprets the creation of the bureaucratically planned economy of the USSR as a social counter-revolution that inaugurated bureaucratic state capitalism in the USSR. For Cliff, the bureaucracy is transformed into a collective capitalist because it undertook the “bourgeois” task of accumulation. As he says:

“Under capitalism the consumption of the masses is subordinated to accumulation.” (Cliff, op cit p34)

“What is specific to capitalism is accumulation for accumulation’s sake, with the object of standing up to competition.” Gbid, p168)

. The fact that the bureaucracy fulfils the task of the capitalist class, and by doing so transforms itself into a class, makes it the purest personification of this class.” (ibid, p169-70)

Cliff has no problem in showing figures for the First Five Year Plan (1929-33) which show a marked shift in priority away from individual consumption towards accumulation of the means of production. These are not in dispute. But within the use to which Cliff puts these figures lies that key element of Cliffs method, the use of the syllogism: under the first Five Year Plan consumption was subordinated to accumulation; under capitalism, consumption is subordinated to accumulation; therefore the First Five Year Plan was capitalist.

Accumulation by the bourgeoisie is the accumulation of capital which, of course, takes on the concrete appearance of machines, tools etc. However, whether such use values are capital in any

6 WORKERS POWER

given situation is not determined by the mere fact that they are accumulated. As early Wage Labour and Capital Marx argued:

“Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour and raw materials, not only of material products, it consists just as much of exchange-values. All the products of which it consists are commodities . . . Capital does not consist in accumulated labour serving living labour as a means for new production. It consists in living labour serving accumulated labour as means of maintaining and multiplying the exchange-value of the latter.” (Wage Labour and Capital, Marx and Engels, Selected Works p212-3)

The means of production in the USSR do not have the character of commodities, they are not produced for eventual sale on the market. They are transferred from one state enterprise to another, according to a predetermined plan which has decided the proportions in which different sets of commodities will be produced. It is not left to the market to decide which is needed and which, by dint of its inability to find a purchaser is useless.

The healthiest of workers’ states would have to accumulate use-values, in particular means of production. If it is to progress towards socialism it will have to expand production on a huge scale. Consumption will have to be subordinated to accumulation in any workers’ state or socialism is impossible. Under Lenin’s leadership the early Soviet Republic did not somehow become capitalist because all consumption was cut back in an effort to produce munitions and supplies for the Red Army to resist the wars of intervention!

In order to buttress his case Cliff claims that what makes Russia’s accumulation “capitalist” is the fact that it is carried out in order to survive in competition—to repeat a quote from Cliff:

“What is specific to capitalism is accumulation for accumulation’s sake, with the object of standing up to competition.”

He decides he does not need to prove that the social relations of production are primarily concerned with the accumulation of exchange values. In order to do so he would have to establish that the wage labour/capital relationship dominates the production process and that, as a result, labour power is a commodity in the USSR. But in the various versions of his book (1948, 1955, 1964, 1974) Cliff has consistently denied this:

“. .. if one examines the relations within the Russian economy, one is bound to conclude that the source of the law of value, as the motor and regulator of production, is not to be found within it. In essence, the laws prevailing in the relations between the labourers and the employer-state would be no different if Russia were one big factory managed directly from one centre, and if all the labourers received the goods they consumed in kind.” (T Cliff op cit. p208-9)

Assuming that the USSR is just like one large

company operating on the world market, Cliff believes he only has to prove the existence of, and determining nature of, the competitive relations between the “state capitalist” blocks to demonstrate their capitalist character. Thus:

“But as it is, Stalinist decisions are based on factors outside of their control, namely the world economy, world competition.” (ibid, p209)

Cliff argues that although the USSR has replaced commodity exchange within the USSR by a mere technical division of labour, the law of value dominates it through the exigencies of world capitalism. Cliff is aware that the USSR’s trade with the imperialist countries is relatively small. He does not stop to consider the implications for a “state capitalism” that deliberately abstains from and avoids capitalistic exchanges.

Instead he tries to prove that the capitalist nature of the USSR is determined by the character and scale of US military competition with the west. Because this competition does not take place through exchange, Cliff is driven to argue that the use-values (i.e. tanks, guns, nuclear warheads) act as though they were exchange values:

“Because international competition takes mainly a military form the law of value expresses itself in its opposite, viz a striving after use-values.” (ibid)

Once again Cliff equates the accumulation of usevalues with the accumulation of capital. “Striving after use-values” is only another way of saying “striving to accumulate material wealth”, something which has been a common feature of all societies save the most primitive.

There is no doubt that the pressure of military competition does exercise a distorting effect on the Soviet economy, as it will have on the economy of any workers’ state—healthy or unhealthy. But none of this means that military competition can take the place, or have the same results as capitalist competition.

One cannot explain the capitalist character of an economy from an analysis of competition. As Marx explained:

“Competition executes the inner laws of capital; makes them into compulsory laws toward the individual capital. But it does not invent them. It realises them. To try and explain them simply as results of competition therefore means to concede that one does not understand them.” (K Marx, Grundrisse , Harmondsworth, 1977, p751-2)

If it is impossible to prove the existence of the law of value from an analysis of competition it is also equally impossible to derive the capitalist character of competition by focussing on the military form of competition. There is nothing specifically capitalist per se about military competition. Again to prove it was such, Cliff would have to show that the state engaging in the competition was producing capitalist commodities, which is exactly what he admits he cannot do. Instead he tries by sleight of hand to invest use values with the character of exchange values.

IS LABOUR POWER A COMMODITY?

Cliffs attempts to prove that either “accumulation” or “competition” made Russia capitalist clearly do not stand up. Evident unease at Cliffs categories has encouraged a debate within the SWP over the question of whether labour power is a commodity in the USSR. Binns and Haynes stand on one side in the argument. In ISJ 2:7 they argued that:

“Labour power cannot be a commodity in the USSR because with only one company (USSR Ltd) purchasing it, there cannot be a genuine labour market there.” (p29)

This is, in effect, Cliffs argument of thirty years ago, and one we presume he still holds. It does however threaten to bring the entire theoretical edifice of “state capitalism” crashing to the ground. Duncan Hallas obviously sensed this and replied quite sharply:

“If labour power is not a commodity in the USSR, then there is no proletariat. Moreover, if labour power is not a commodity, then there can be no wage labour/capital relationship and therefore no capital either. Therefore, there can be no capitalism in any shape or form.” (ISJ 2:9)

Apart from anything else this is a refutation of Cliffs work. More recently, Alex Callinicos has gone to great length to back Hallas up and even openly attacks Cliff on this point.

A false argument has ensued which revolves around whether or not labour power in the USSR is “free” in the sense Marx described it; i.e. free from means of production so that each labourer must sell his/her power for a limited period and be free to change their employer. On the one side, Binns and Haynes can marshal evidence to show what restrictions exist on the free movement of labour in the USSR. On the other hand, Callinicos argues that:

“When we look at the reality of Soviet society, there is no doubt that labour power is a commodity there. Enterprises compete for workers, offering all sorts of illegal bonuses to persuade people to work for them. Workers have a considerable degree of choice—they are not compelled to work in a particular factory.” (ISJ 2:12 p15)

Both approaches are equally one-sided. They emphasise certain aspects of the situation in order to “prove” or “disprove” the commodity nature of labour power. In fact, all Hallas proves is that the Soviet working class is not a slave class. Following the logic of Cliffs variant of state capitalism Haynes and Binns suggest it is. The fact that wage incentives, bonus payments ete exist in the USSR does not in itself enable Callinicos to shore up Cliffs state capitalist theory. They would exist in a healthy dictatorship of the proletariat as a result of the fact that it would arise out of a break with capitalism and could not immediately leap to communism where inequalities no longer exist.

For Marx, free labour in the sense of the purchase and sale of labour power was a juridical

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 7

question, and an essential part in the whole question of the production and exchange of commodities. It is in this area that massive restrictions exist in the USSR, which do not exist under capitalism. The correct starting point is not to focus on the abstracted question “is labour power a commodity?”, but “to what extent is there generalised commodity production in the USSR? It is clear that commodity production and exchange only exists in pure form in the black market, and co-ops, but even here it is predominantly simple commodity production, not capitalist commodity production.

As far as the state sector is concerned the matter is different again. The bulk of material production in the USSR concerns the production of the means of production. These goods are not produced for the market, as explained earlier. By and large they are not the subject of sale and purchase transactions so the labour and valorisation process in this sector cannot be a process of commodity production. The labour expended in them is directly social labour. In the consumer goods sector, the nature and volume of these, as with capital goods, is determined by the bureaucracy’s “blind planning mechanisms”. However, there is something of a commodity character imparted to consumer goods because unlike capital goods, a considerable portion of consumer goods are distributed in a different manner, not according to a plan. They are produced for an unknown market and are exchanged against money wages. The labour carried out in this production is not directly social labour, as it is only recognised as such after the sale (if at all).

The same, dialectical, view should be taken of “labour power as a commodity”. The fact that the worker sells, and the bureaucracy purchases, the worker's labour capacity via the medium of money indicates the continuing commodity character of labour power. However, on the other hand, the market price of labour power is not determined by supply and demand under the pressure of an army of unemployed. The wage fund is set in advance by the bureaucracy which determines general wage levels in different sectors. It is possible to make similar observations about other economic categories such as prices of production, money ete, which achieve their fullest and most developed expression under capitalism but which continue to exist in the USSR in an underdeveloped form as they would in any post-capitalist society.

THE BUREAUCRACY AS RULING CASTE

Behind all the garbled economic categories lies one argument that is always at the centre of the state capitalist case. In arguing against the Trotskyist view of the USSR as a degenerate workers’ state, state capitalist theory constantly repeats the refrain that it cannot be any form of workers’ state if the workers are oppressed and have no political

8 WORKERS POWER .

power, and that the bureaucratic agent of this oppression must therefore be a ruling class. To quote Alan Gibbons:

“1929 saw the abolition of independent trade unions, the abolition of the right to strike, the forcing down of wages. That these are the policies of Tory governments today shows that Russia has become but one capitalist power among others— the only difference being that in Russia the state itself was the ruling class, that it was state capitalism.” (How the Revolution Was Lost, p28)

The central problem is whether the working class can be said to be the ruling class where its political power is not expressed through mass organs of proletarian power or the rule of its vanguard party? Can the class rule of the workers exist where a bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class has been established ? At the heart of this dispute is the question of how Marxists define the class nature of any state. Trotsky argued on this:

“Friederich Engels once wrote that the state, including the democratic republic, consists of detachments of armed men in defence of property, everything else serves only to embellish or camouflage this fact.” (Whither France)

It followed that the class nature of any state was determined by the property relations that it defends. Despite the monstrous tyranny of the Stalinist bureaucracy the property relations of the USSR—state planning—remain those that the proletariat must take hold of if it is to carry through the transition to socialism. To that extent the property relations remain proletarian despite the rule of the bureaucracy and the need for the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracy as a prerequisite for using those property relations to effect a socialist transition.

Hallas and Binns have attacked this method of evaluating the character of the soviet state:

“This is a fundamental break with Marx and Lenin and with Trotsky’s own earlier position.” (ISJ 91 September 1976)

It can hardly be called a fundamental break with Marx. This is how Marx posed the question of evaluating the character of a given state:

“It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers .. . which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political forms of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.” (Capital Vol 3 p772)

For Trotskyists the USSR remains a proletarian state because it defends, and even in certain circumstances extends, the expropriation of capitalism and the subordination of its laws. The SWP’s attempts to prove that the USSR is capitalist do not stand the test of serious examination. But what of their negative case against the “degenerate workers’ state” theory that the non-existence of workers’ power proves that the USSR cannot be a workers’ state?

The history of capitalist development provides instances where the capitalist class did not exercise’political power directly but the state was still capitalist. For example, in France in the Napoleonic era, in the Restoration period, and in the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon the bourgecisie was excluded from direct access to political power. Trotsky was the first Marxist to develop an analogy between this experience of bourgeois development andthe degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

The proletariat lost political power in Russia without the immediate re-introduction of capitalism. However, there are important differences between a capitalist state where the bourgeoisie has lost political power and a proletarian state where the working class is politically expropriated. The bourgeoisie did not need to directly rule for. capitalism to grow and develop because it is based on the blind spontaneous méchanism of the market. However, the working class cannot move forward to socialism without ruling politically. That is why the transition in the USSR is not only blocked but is reversed.

The bureaucracy undermines the continued existence of even the blind planning that éxists. It prepares the ground for the restoration of capitalism. The result of this contradictory state of affairs is that the “state” in the USSR continues in precisely the “form” but not the social content that Marxists seek to abolish—set above and against the toilers. Far from a tendency to ever greater equality, inequalities continue and are even exaggerated:

The capitalist norms of distribution and exchange that Marxists seek to destroy and replace will remain and are strengthened by “market reforms”. All this demands a political revolution by the working class to once again clear the road for the transition to socialism and communism.

The SWP, on the other hand, reduce the question of workers’ state to a political and superstructural question, to the political forms through which the dictatorship was organised. This is at one with the un-Marxist normative method employed in every dimension of the state capitalist argument.

The designation of the Russian bureaucracy as a capitalist ruling class because it performs tasks

“normally” historically undertaken by a bourgeois class, is another example of crass schematic thinking. Cliff expressed it in the following way:

“The fact that the bureaucracy fulfils the tasks of the capitalist class, and by so doing transforms itself into @ class, makes it the purest personification’ of this class. Although it is different from the capitalist class, it is at one and the same time the nearest to its historical essence.” (Chiff, op cit, p118)

Trotsky showed how the “normal”. progress of capitalism in Russia could not occur as it had in western Europe when he developed his theory of permanent revolution. What is “normal” in one historical period becomes “impossible” in the next. In just this fashion it will fall to the international working class-in the greater part of the world to undertake extensive industrialisation. Will the proletariat therefore become a bourgeoisie?

If the bureaucracy does not constitute a capitalist class is it possible:that it does still, nonetheless, constitute a ruling class? Cliff and co have always attempted to'steer clear of the implication that the USSR was some kind of “new class” society as Shachtman, Djilas and others. since have claimed.

Cliff simply asserts that the bureaucracy is a class because their role can be squared with an -° extracted quote from Lenin:

“We call classes large groups of people that are distinctive by the place they occupy in a definite historically established system of social production.” (ibid p166)

“In fact Cliff fails to grasp what is meant by “definite historically established system of social production”. The USSR is a transitional society comprised of elements of post-capitalist society and elements of capitalism. This is reflected in the fact that the bureaucracy has no “definite historically established” role to play in the USSR. While the bourgeoisie under capitalism is a necessary component of the relations of production of the capitalist system, the Soviet bureaucracy is not such a necessary element in the planned property relations of the USSR.

On the contrary its monopoly of political power, its control over distribution is, and always has been (even during the most dynamic phases of Soviet economic development), an obstacle to the full realisation of the potential of the property relations of the USSR.

In all hitherto existing societies the property relations, and the class structures that necessarily flowed from them, became a brake on the development of the “productive forces of mankind. In the USSR it is not the property relations but a layer of administrators and distributors who block the development of the productive forces.

When we strip away the jumble of pseudo-Marxist categories we can begin to see state capitalist theory for what it is. It proceeds from authority Telations in the USSR, from outrage at the evidently repressive coercive regime, to reject Trotsky’ s dialectical understanding of the USSR. This is the same method all other “new. class” theorists have used and is why it is no surprise that when its use of Marxist terms is debunked state capitalism looks remarkably like a “new class” theory. .

“THE POLITICS OF THESWP 9

Solidarnosc challenges for power

SWP members will always defend their state capitalist theory as the one that is

least tainted with reformist perspectives in the Stalinist states. The upheavals in Poland throughout the 1980s enable us to demonstrate the

political logic of state capitalism. Here in two articles on Poland, during 1980-81 and 1989 respectively, we show that the SWP cannot face up to, let alone answer, any of the key questions raised by the struggle for power against the

Stalinist ruling caste.

Russia is a form of “workers’ state” of being

automatically soft on the dureaucracy that rules these states. In fact this is far from the truth. The Trotskyist programme for “political revolution” is a programme for the revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracy at the hands of the organs of a healthy workers’ state—workers' councils and a workers’ militia. It has nothing in common with programmes for “democratising” the existing Stalinist regimes hand in hand with sections of the bureaucracy peddled by degenerate “Trotskyism”.

For us the task of the political revolution is to unlock the transition to socialism by taking power directly into the hands of the toilers. The alternative is for the bureaucracy and its technical advisers to increasingly try to by-pass the effects of its own ina bility to plan dynamically by strengthening the operations of the norms of a capitalist economy in the workers’ states themselves. We are opposed to any such strengthening of market mechanisms, incentive schemes, in that they pull the societies further away from the transition to socialism and towards the reintroduction of capitalist property relations. Our programme is for a democratically centralised economy in the hands of workers organised in workers’ councils and a workers’ militia. We are for workers’ council power not parliamentary power.

Cliff, in Russia: a Marist Analysis, raised the prospect of a spontaneous repeat of the Hungarian work ers’ councils of 1956 in all the countries of Eastem Europe:

“The class struggle in Stalinist Russia must inevitably express itself in gigantic spontaneous outbursts of millions. Till then the omnipotent sway of the secret police will make it impossible for a revolutionary party to penetrate the masses or organise any systematic action whatsoever.” (p349)

It will have as its task, however, the opening of,

10 WORKERS POWER

T HE SWP commonly accuse those who hoid that

“the field for the free activity of all the parties tendencies and groups in the working class.”

That is all the author of this particular variant of state capitalism can offer in the entire book as a perspective and programme for militant workers wanting to destroy the Stalinist bureaucracy.

If we look at the position of the SWP on the Polish revolution of 1980-81 we can see just how politically crippling is the view that Poland, and other states like it, are a form of capitalism. It led both to a series of fatally false characterisations of rival tendencies in the Polish workers’ movement and merely a militant trade unionist programme that could not advance a road for the Polish workers to take power.

The longer Stalinism strangles the workers’ states the stronger becomes the appeal of anticommunist programmes to the intelligentsia and sections of the working class. It is Stalinism that discredits the socialist programme in the eyes of millions of workers. This means that it remains a vital task of communists to found revolutionary parties that can wage a war against Stalinism and against forces seeking to use the struggles of the working class in order to advance their own particular counterrevoiutionary objectives.

In Poland this included the democratic intelligentsia around Kuron and Michnik who wanted a social democratic Poland with a mixed economy and pariiamentary institutions modelled on the west. It obviously included the Catholic church and the openly restorationist Confederation for an Independent Poland {KPN). Unless a party exists to fight against these elements the spontaneous mobilisation of the Polish workers is not capable of destroying Stalinism and could even serve, in the short term, to strengthen the hands of elements who have no interest in secur ing workers’ power.

In Class Struggies in Easter Europe (1983) Chris Harman fails to come to grips with the real nature of

psi

the major pretenders to leadership in Sotidarnosc. Just because Kuron and Michnik did not want to seize power (itself an element of their utopian scheme for a gradual social democratisation of Poland—Finlandisation) Harman decides they must be syndicaiists:

“it was, indeed, a version of classic syndicalism— the belief that workers’ problems can be solved by building strong union organisation, without paying any heed to the question of state power.” (p245)

State capitalism prevents its protagonists from understanding the real nature of Kuron and Michnik’s political programme, one which aimed to use the workers’ genuine grievances against bureaucratic planning to strengthen the mechanism of the market by establishing the “autonomy of the enterprise”. Harman is even more glaringly wrong about the programme of the church and the consequences of that for Solidarnosc. He quotes as good coin a statement from John Paul Il that:

“The Church is wilting to reach mutual agreement with any economic system as long as it is permitted to preach to the people about Christ.” (p256)

Chris Harman may not know the difference between capitalist and postcapitalist property forms but the Catholic hierarchy most certainiy does. To the very marrow of its bones it is wedded to private property, to defending it when it’s under attack and extending and re-developing it where it has been abolished or subordinated. While the Catholic church fears a show down with the Stalinists, within which the working class is mobilised in its own organisations and for its own interests, it is committed to ending state prop erty in Poiand as part of its global counter-revolutionary aims.

To that end it used its authority in the workers’ movement—and in particular over the Catholic inteiligentsia—to advance a programme that would abort a workers’ revolution and strengthen capitalist elements and laws at the same time. Not understanding the nature of the property relations in Poland Chris Har man could not grasp the guise that reaction and counter-revolution appeared in during the Polish revoiutionary crisis.

Harman's method is to concoct a cocktail of trade unionism and spontaneism to fit the needs of a workers’ movement on the advance. He finds the key to Solidammosc’s eventual defeat in the failure of the leadership to support economic struggles after March 1981:

“They did not understand the sources of strength of a workers’ movement. It grows as the mass of people begin to see it as a means of lifting from their shoulders the burdens that bear down on them in their everyday lives.” (p263)

Harman laments the failure of the Sclidamosc lead ership to wage the struggle as a form of militant generalised economic struggle:

“A mass movement only gathers strength as workers gain confidence for political battle from economic victories and in turn see political victories as feeding back into economic gains. Such confidence cannot

be turned on mechanically by the leaders pressing a button.” (p270) ,

What state capitalist theory blinds him to is that the very nature of the planned economy, and the central allocation of resources, renders a programme of militant economic struggle even more inadequate than in the west. In each struggle the workers immediately come face to face with the central state power and its agents. What was missing in Poland was a programme for taking political power, not a leadership able to maintain mass confidence by securing regular economic gains for the workers.

In classic economist terms the argument for building a party is posed strictly in terms of organising existing spontaneous militancy:

“A method of organisation at the base of the union to co-ordinate the spontaneously developing struggles, | regardless of what the ‘moderate’ day-to-day national union leadership wanted.” (p280)

The truth is that while spontaneous creation of embryonic soviets and workers’ militia posed the possibility of organising to seize power the militancy remained under a political leadership that wished to avoid this at all costs. Solidarnose remained a contradictionwracked mass movement doomed to defeat unless a new political leadership was forged on a programme that could organise the workers for power. No such programme was advanced by the SWP. They had no programme for Poland beyond calling for Solidamosc to take power with its then existing leader-

ship. :

AS Chris Harman says of the new party that he advocates:

“|, the basic slogan such a party would have put forward—that Solidarnosc should smash the existing state and itself take power.” (p281)

How and with what programme Harman does not say. The reality is the then existing Solidarnosc in power would have strengthened the market economy and parliamentary forms—not built a workers’ state. But Harman's belief that capitalism already exists in Poland disarms him to these dangers.

State capitalism in fact produces an anti-Stalinist programme that is prepared to struggle for reforms that would strengthen private capitalism's economic mechanisms against those of the state capitalists and strengthen bourgeois parliamentary. forms against both bureaucratic tyranny and workers’ power. This puts state capitalists in a different camp to Trotskyists. Our implacable hostility to the bureaucracy does not extend to giving restorationists a helping hand—Cliff and co are left trailing a liberal bourgeois democratic programme now in the hope of a normal generalised trade union struggle against the bosses in the future.

The state capitalist theory of the SWP tradition has as its roots a codified expression of its syndicalist world view. The bitter fruit of its twinned syndicalism and state capitalism is amply revealed in Poland. State capitalism can add nothing new to the Trotskyist programme for Statinism’s revolutionary overthrow. It can only confuse and mislead workers who challenge bureaucratic rule.

THE POLITICS OF THESWP 11

Solidarnosc takes

the power

HE NON-STALINIST far left in Britain has been, in its majority, uncritical in its support for Solidarnosc from the outset. This has included blind

support for its leadership.

The installation of the new Polish government dominated by Solidarnosc ministers, has been fol lowed by a stream of pro-capitalist statements from these Catholic nationalist leaders and their advisers. The “sudden” realisation by many on the left of the slavishly pro-westerm imperialist nature of this very leadership has caused considerable turmoil amongst Solidarnosc’s fans.

Socialist Worker, the paper of the SWP, a “state capitalist” tendency, hardly knows which way to tum. It declares that the entry of Solidarnosc into govemment “can only encourage those fighting for change the world over” but then add darkly that “there is another side to the picture”.

The bad side is that Solidarnose does not have enough power or rather it does not have any real power at all, only govemmental office. Thelr enthuslasm for the entry of Solidarnosc into the govenr ment is because they see It as a victory for the millions of workers who were part of the Solidarnosc movement in 1980.

But the leaders who have been elected to office nine years later are not in any shape or form representative of that revolutionary struggle of the working class. Although the Polish proletariat and peasantry overwhelmingly awarded its franchise to the Solidarnose candidates, the govemment is not a workers’ government.

Firstly, the Walesa leadership can in no way be described as the democratic representatives of the union’s two million members. Unelected since 1981, Walesa has refused to reconvene a Solidamosc congress since then. Secondly, the candidates were selected by committees of intellectual experts, clert cal and lay functionaries of the church.

They stood on no political platform beyond the name “Soltidarnose”. Their popularity in the election, an expression of opposition to the ruling Stalinist dictator Jaruzelski, was not an endorsement of the policies these jeaders now advocate. Rather than a party of the working class, the Solidarnosc leadership is divorced from any direct accountable link to the union members, relying instead on the historic popularity of the movement to win them votes.

Since the election, however, the viciously procapitalist austerity programme of Walesa and Mazowiecki, which they share with Jaruzelski and the dominant faction of the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP), has been openly displayed.

On 22 August Walesa told the Italian daily i/ Mes-

12 WORKERS POWER

Saggero:

“Until now nobody has adopted the road that leads from socialism towards capitalism. And that is what we will try to do: return to the pre-war situation, after having gone through a long period of socialism

. Our economic and political models are those of western countries that have obtained good results.” (22.8.89)

In addition to this loyaity pledge to capitalism, the government has demonstrated its determination to make the working class pay the price of stabilising the economy in preparation for the great auction of state property to the capitalists of the world. As the SWP themselves report:

“The enthusiasm of Solidamosc supporters has been tempered by price increases of up to 500% for basic foods and consumer goods at the start of August.”

This austerity programme Is completely in line with the project of the Solidarnose feaders, but for the SWP it appears as some kind of accidental betrayal of the working class.

“Tragically, the leaders of Solidamose look to be set on playing this role, attacking workers’ living standards whiie using their popular support to head off any social upheaval which threatens the rulers’ power.”

To avoid this “tragedy” the SWP call on the Solidarmose rulers to remain true to their working class supporters and pursue policies which would defeat the real power of the “bosses”, i.e. break with the Stalinists. Their advice to Walesa Is that “Solidarnosc should be trying to strengthen factory organlsation In order to build a real power base.” Nowhere do they challenge or even discuss the goals of the leaders of Solidamosc, thereby evading the issue of what such a “power base” In the factories would be used for.

They see as the essential problem the Solidamosc leaders becoming dupes of the crafty Stalinist bureaucrats. Their demands relate to how to make them break from the bureaucracy and pursue an independent road. But they dodge the issue of which class interests such independence would represent. Only in passing does Socialist Worker implicitly crittcise Solidamose for looking “to the market as the solution to the problems of the economy”.

The Walesa leadership is no more a representative of the working class In Poland than the Stalinist butchers he is doing deals with. Both want to take Poland along the road of marketisation, opening up the enterprises toe imperialist exploitation and profiteering. It is as wrong and as stupid to see Walesa as an instrument of working class power as

It would be to see Jaruzelski in.that role. Only the biind Stalinophobia of the SWP could make them call on the féted and cosseted agent of the Vatican, the White House and Downing Street to “break the power of the bureaucrats”. Even if he were able to do so it would be only to replace it with the power of the multinationals.

Despite the clear anti-working class programme of the Solidamose leadership the SWP still have illusions that they can be won to a different road. They say there is a different strategy which the new govemment could pursue:

“if the Solidarnosc leaders Jooked to that power [of the workers’ struggles] and led, instead of holding workers’ struggles back, a very different road is possible.”

The question the SWP constantly dodges is what the class character of a Solidarnosc govemment with real power would be. Walesa’s goal is capitalist restoration. The policies of the government, supported by Jaruzelski and sanctioned by the Kremlin, are leading towards the maximum marketisation of the economy. Pursued to its logical conclusion this would mean the restoration of a bourgeoisie in Poland, a social counter-revolution. j

A clear class analysis of the events In Poland is not possible for the SWP. They are thrown com pletely by their wrong class characterisation of Poland and therefore of all the contending forces. Their state capitalism leads them to ignore the pro-imperialist character of the Solidarmose government because, for them, Poland is already capitalist. They therefore maintain a total silence on the issue of property relations.

in their position there is not a word about the need to defend the state property against privatisation by the local and international capitalist vul tures. Not a word about the only altemative to “market methods”—planning.

Their nonMarxist theory holds that the features of a workers’ state, the expropriation of the bour geoisie, total state ownership of the means of production, centralised planning and the monopoly of foreign trade can be and indeed are for them, features of “state capitalism”. The working class has no reason to regard these as its conquests or its instruments, nor has it any particular reason to defend them.

Revolutionary Marxists (Trotskyists) on the contrary assert that there exist no other economic instruments than these to defeat and subordinate the law of value. That is, to transform society from one based on the anarchy and crises of capitalism into

one based on the rational allocation of abundant”

resources to meet human need. The state capitalists blithely junk all this without offering any alternative economle instruments they may have discovered.

They cover up their unilateral programmatic disarmament in front of capitalism with confused cries

about the existing degenerate workers’ states which boil down to the jibe; “call this socialism?”. No we

do not! Revolutionary Marxists have ahways argued that workers’ states that suffered a qualitative degenera-

tion, or were created as degenerate workers’ states, were not only not socialist but not.even advancing towards socialism. ; ‘

On the contrary, if the working class is deprived of political power over its own state (its own because it still defends the soclal expropriation of the bourgeolsie) by a usurping caste of bureaucratic parasites then a process of increasing chaos and cok lapse could lead to a restoration of capitalism, a social counter-revolution.

‘ Because the bureaucrats direct the plan to magnify their own privileges; because they stifle all freedom of criticism and terrorise all opposition and because. they claim this chaos and repression is socialism, then they Increasingly alienate the working class from its own state. But this caste is not to be identifled with the planned property relations. It exists in contradiction to them.

The bureaucracy’s parasitism and mismanagement will bring the planned property relations, to the brink of collapse. This is what is happening now in Poland. The bureaucracy Is not a class which historically embodies a specific mode of production but a parasite—ultimately a deadly parasite.

It is—as the Polish workers themselves have shown—quite possible to “break the power of the bureaucracy in every factory” as the SWP suggest, and to drive out the bosses (since there are few private owners we can only assume they mean the state appointed managers). And then?

The factories have to produce or people starve. What shall they produce? It clearly cannot be left up to each workplace to decide in isolation. But our state capitalists dare not even mention the plan or what the workers should do about it. At this point they remark that seling the factories would be a revolution.

But they are wrong. What they call for would be at best half a revolution like the one the Polish workers made in 1980-81. And, as Lenin said, those who make half a revolution are doomed.

If workers know only what they do not want to be done—if they merely obstruct the plans of the bureaucracy (and Solidarnosc)—then all that will happen is that there will be further chaos, economic deprivation and demoralisation until they bitterly and reluctantly give in. A real revolution would destroy the power of the bureaucracy by force and Institute a regime of genuine workers’ power committed to the transition to socialism. To achieve this the PolIsh workers must know what they wish to preserve and what they wish to destroy.

They must employ means sufficient to achleve this—the general strike and an insurrection that smashes and wins over the armed forces of the state. To mobilise and deploy this force requires the creation of workers’ councils, a workers’ militia and a party. None of these can be built except in remorseless struggie against Walesa and Jaruzeiski.

The SWP is incapable of recognising, let alone defending, the Polish workers’ past gains. Nor Is it capable of outlining a strategy for seizure of working class political power in Poland.

Instead the SWP can only muse on the “tragic” dilemma of Solidarnosc.M ;

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 13

The view from the third camp

Conflicts between imperialism and petit bourgeois nationalist and Stalinistted forces in the semicolonial world have peppered the post-war era. From Korea in the 1950s through to Afghanistan in the 1980s revolutionaries have had to declare which side they were on. Here, Dave Hunt asks this question of the SWP and its forerunners.

his various groups into fundamental errors over a series of post-war conflicts. Cliffs first organisation was built around the journal Soaal-

ist’ Review (SR), which began publication in Norember 1950 inside the Labour Party. It was the first publication to appear from this stable after Cliffs break with the Fourth International (FI).

oe +H & at § FE

world had been divided into two giant capitalist camps provided no better a view of the post war world.

It shared with the FI the belief in an imminent “Third World War”. Also it failed to develop a revo-

ism”.

According to the early SR both Traman’s America and Stalin’s Russia were being propelled by the same motive force in their drive for world domination. Conflict between the two imperialisms threatened mankind with the more or less immediate prospect of a new—albeit As SR No 1 declared:

“The ‘Peace’ Campaign of Stalin’s Russia is no

14 WORKERS POWER

less hypocritical than ‘Truman’s Defence of Democ-

war.” (SR Vol 1, No 1, November 1950)

The Cliffites thus accepted the view that the set on global domination at the expense of Truman’s America. This echoing of Cold War propaganda was OR en Rea the crake 186s le 1954 ie wee

(SRG) throughout the early 1950s. In 1954 it was declaring that the two powers were driven towards war with each other by their respective economic problems. was increasingly presenting US capitalism with a stark choice:

“Slump or war are the two alternatives facing western monopoly capitalism, and faced with this chaice, there is no doubt what the ruling classes of the west will choose.” (SR Vol 3, No 7)

more steel: China’s need for steel may still push the Kremlin to invade Western Europe later, so

SR claimed. In fact the SRG’s characterisation of the Soviet

cones

Union as a state capitalist and expansionist imperialist power gave rise to a totally false understanding of the nature of Stalinism. All the evidence, from Stalin’s foreign policy and from the Soviet Union’s attitude to revolutionary situations which threatened capitalist dominance, demonstrated a totally different role for Stalinism than that ascribed to it by the Cliffites.

Far from being an expansionist force looking for every opportunity to extend its rule at the expense of western imperialism, the Soviet bureaucracy demonstrated in the post-war years, that it was a social formation bent on international class collaboration and compromise with the imperialist bourgeoisie. Not only did Soviet withdrawal from Austria contradict Cliffs schemas, but in both Greece and Indo-China Stalin demonstrated his intention of maintaining his pact with the bourgeoisie on “spheres of influence” by sabotaging the struggle against imperialism. In Eastern Europe the bourgeoisie was kept in power after the war and no steps were taken to ensure a Stalinist takeover until after the offensive launched by Truman in 1947.

The “Truman Doctrine”, promising military intervention anywhere in the world “threatened by communism” combined with the economic offensive of Marshall Aid, aimed at Eastern as well as Western Europe, faced the Soviet Union with a choice. It could either retreat from Eastern Europe, thus massively weakening its own position in the face of an imperialist offensive, or complete a Stalinist overthrow of capitalism. It chose the latter.

Yet even during the US-led Cold War offensive Stalin continued to demonstrate his reluctance to overthrow capitalist property relations. Until the eleventh hour he repeatedly advised Mao against toppling Chiang Kai Shek’s disintegrating regime. The USSR handed back “its” part of Austria in return for the country’s neutrality and proposed the same for Germany—i.e. a reunified, capitalist, but disarmed and neutral country.

THE THIRD CAMP

This did not fit in with the SRG’s analysis of Soviet expansionism, but their analysis did fit in very well with a group which wanted to swim with the stream in Cold War Britain. The political consequence of this view for the SRG was that a conflict between the USA and the USSR was a conflict between two imperialisms and as such it was necessary to adopt a position of neutrality in the conflicts between them. (In fact SR’s pages were heavily weighted towards anti-Soviet propaganda during this period, with a regular series of articles from Tony Cliff on the miseries of life in the USSR).

This neutrality took the form of a commitment to building a “Third Camp” under the slogan raised in the first issue of SR: “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism”. SR was not

the first to raise the idea of a “third camp”—it was the stock in trade of the Tribune. group. Figures such as Foot, Mikardo and Crossman denounced Soviet and western imperialism with gusto. But with the Cold War, these social democrats loyally trooped behind NATO and the Anglo-American alliance. It was the Cliffites who picked up the rhetoric and bolstered it with state capitalist theory. Not surprisingly the call for a third camp was raised first in SR by one Stan Newens (later a leading Tribunite MP) in the following fashion:

“The present power of the two world camps is largely based on the dragooning by force and trickery of the many by the few. Let us set up our standard against all such methods and lead the way to working for a genuine international socialism—not for Washington, nor for Moscow.” (SR Vol 3, No 4)

For the SRG the slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow” suited the prejudices of the left reformist current in the Labour Party, in which they were immersed, very well. It led the SRG into alliance with a motley variety of political tendencies. SR of October 1955 carries a favourable report of a “Third Way is the Only Way” international conference attended by 110 delegates.

While it is silent as to which organisations were represented, the nature of SR’s allies is made clear in its pages over the next months. The October 1955 issue contains an article by Max Shachtman extoling the “third way”. By May 1956 SR carried—as a supplement—Tony Cliffs “The future of the Russian empire” published by Lebour Action (Shachtman’s US paper) in collaboration with SR.

The Shachtmanites did not hang around in the “third camp” for very long. They were very soon declaring Soviet totalitarianism a greater threat to socialism than US democracy, and putting themselves firmly in the camp of US imperialism. But it was not only the Shachtman group that rallied to the banner of the “third way”. It also attracted the anti-Leninist libertarian “Socialisme ou Barbarie” of P Cardan whose material also appeared in SR and early issues of International Socialism. The Third Camp conference proved a rallying point for libertarians and social democrats who, ultimately, had nothing in common except their hostility, both to the Kremlin bureaucracy and revolutionary Leninism.

Even if the Cliffites pulled back from the logic of Shachtman and Newens’ Third Camp position they nevertheless ended up by refusing to support genuine struggles against imperialism. Their slogan for “International Socialism” was never given a revolutionary communist meaning in the actual struggles against imperialism. This would have meant developing slogans and tactics which both supported unconditionally the struggle against imperialism and aimed to mobilise the working masses against Stalinist counter-revolution. It remained instead a political fig leaf to cover their refusal to give support in the struggle against

THE POLITICS OF THESWP 15

imperialism. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in the Korean War.

NEUTRAL IN THE KOREAN WAR

The formation of the SRG coincided with the onset of the Korean War. The programmatic conclusions that logically flow from state capitalist theory meant that the SRG inevitably adopted a position in that conflict that failed to distinguish between Stalinist-led struggles for national liberation against imperialism and the forces of imperialism itself. The Communist Parties were seen as agents of Kremlin imperialism—or as SR No 2 (January 1951) called them “Moscow’s Foreign Legion’.

At the end of the Second World War Soviet and US forces occupied Korea. At the same time “Committees of Preparation for National Independence” mushroomed throughout Korea predominantly under Stalinist leadership. An all-Korean People’s Republic government was declared on 6 September 1945. The USA refused to recognise this government and created its own under the much despised emigré rightist Syngman Rhee. The ensuing conflict between the Northern, Soviet backed and Southern, US backed governments was therefore a form of civil war in Korea within which the northern Stalinist regime had the leadership of those forces fighting imperialism and its agents.

When direct military hostilities broke out between the two regimes and the Northern armies overran the South in June, it should not have been difficult for revolutionaries to see which side they were on. They would have been for a victory of the North against the Rhee puppet regime and its US backers. And when—under the cloak of a UN peace keeping force—the USA poured troops into Korea and provoked a direct military conflict with China, it should have been even easier for any socialist not blinded by cold war anti-communist hysteria to know what side to take.

Revolutionary socialists should have unconditionally defended the North Koreans and their Kremlin allies on the recognition that a defeat inflicted upon the really expansionist USA would have been a massive blow to its plans. Unlike the SRG it was necessary to draw a distinction between the Stalinist leadership (which eventually sold the struggle short) and the popular mass forces involved, striving to overthrow a hated regime. Defending North Korea and seeking to win the leadership of the Korean masses were complementary, not contradictory, tasks.

The SRG, however, proceeded to demonstrate quite how reactionary the programmatic conclusions of the theory of state capitalism really are. SR took a predictable and logical view of the conflict. In an article entitled “The struggle of the powers” R Tennant declared that, “The war in Korea serves the great powers as a rehearsal for their intended struggle for the redivision of the globe.” (SR Vol 1, No 2, January 1950) and in an

16 WORKERS POWER

attack on Socialist Outlook’s (a paper run by Gerry Healy) support for North Korea, Bill Ainsworth talked of “our opinion . . . that Russia no less than the USA, is imperialist and bent on world domination”. (ibid) It followed that:

“We can, therefore, give no support to either camp since the war will not achieve the declared aims of either side. Further, long as the two governments are what they are, viz, puppets of the two big powers, the Korean socialists can give no support to their respective puppet governments.” (SR Vol 1, No 2, January 1951)

The Korean position was not a blunder inadvertently committed by an innocent, fledgling organisation. It flowed logically from the theory of state capitalism. The SRG drew exactly the same conclusion from a similar conflict in Vietnam between Stalinist led anti-imperialist forces under Ho Chi Minh and imperialism’s puppet Bao-Dai. In February 1952 they printed and entirely endorsed a statement of the French La Lutte that declared:

“In Korea, the war continues in spite of the parties for an armistice in which, of course, the Korean people have no say. In Vietnam, likewise, the war continues and the people vomit with disgust at both Bao-Dai, the tool of the colonialists, and at Ho Chi Minh, the agent of Stalin.” (SR Vol 1, No 7)

CUBA’S REVOLUTION

The Cuban revolution demonstrated the reactionary logic of state capitalism as once again the Cliffites turned their face against those struggling to defeat imperialism. In the face of a US economic and military blockade the Castro regime proceeded to expropriate US holdings and reorganise the Cuban economy on the basis of bureaucratically planned property relations modelled on those of the USSR. At the same time Castro adopted the Stalinist model of state and party.

The Soviet bureaucracy moved to support the Castroite regime with the threat to place Soviet missiles in Cuba which would have served both to extend the international bargaining position of the Soviet bureaucracy and defend the Cuban revolution against imperialist counter-revolution. Cold War warriors and pacifists alike raised a hue and cry against Castro’s “undemocratic regime” and against the shipment of Soviet arms to Cuba. So too did Cliffs renamed International Socialism group (IS).

The Cliffites took Soviet economic aid to the blockaded Castro regime as evidence that dynamic Soviet capitalism was now ready to do battle for the markets of US imperialism. Doubtless hoping that the USSR was about to indulge in some real capitalist competition, an IS editorial, entitled “From Cold War to price war”, took increased Soviet trade with India and the shipping of Russian oil to Havana to indicate that:

“Russian oil exports look to be the harbinger of mighty economic conflicts between the giants of

aR

capital on either side of the Iron Curtain.” (IS No 38, Autumn 1960)

Mirroring Khruschev’s pompous fantasies about the USSR being poised to outstrip the west economically, the editors continued:

“There seems to be a growing realisation that Russia is beginning to present an economic challenge to western capitalism potentially far more persuasive and threatening than the politico-military challenge of recent years.” (ibid)

As long as the Castroites steered clear of Russian aid the editorial offices of International Socialism were prepared to support them. IS No 6 argued that:

“The pressure on Cuba towards integration into the Soviet bloc will exert pressure towards bureaucratisation of the revolution. But this, so all the evidence seems to show, has not yet happened... The Cubans only turn to Russian power because there is no power of the international working class for them to turn to. Our defence of the Cuban revolution could itself be a step, even a small one, towards creating such a power.”

Cliffs “Third Campism” could not deliver oil or guns. Neither could it break an American blockade. As soon as the Castroites looked to Soviet aid in order to defend themselves the Cliffites deserted the Cuban revolution.

To cover their retreat a series of articles were printed by Sergio Junco pushing the view that Cuba had none of the features of a workers’ state and thus deserved no support against the USA. Following in Shachtman’s footsteps Junco very soon decided that because Castro’s internal regime was repressive, it represented a form of society lower than that achieved in the bourgeois democracies.

He spelt out his position in the pages of Young Guard (IS Youth Paper in LPYS):

“Given the fact that there has never been any popular control of revolutionary institutions in Cuba, it makes no sense to say that this is a socialist or even a progressive society. Nationalism is conducive to socialism only when there exists a state which is owned and controlled by the majority of the people. Otherwise, we get a type of state and society which is less progressive than say, liberal democracy, since in the latter the popular forces are able to organise and actively work for the earliest possible substitution of the system.” (“Cuba and socialism”, Young Guard No 4, December 1961, emphasis in original)

It was IS members, most notably Paul Foot, who sprang to Junco’s support in the face of criticism in the pages of the paper.

If the political forms adopted by the Castroites had already turned the Cliffites off the Cuban revolution, the dispatch of Soviet atomic weapons completed the retreat of the IS into their neutralist corner. While being perfectly aware that the Soviet Union assists anti-imperialist struggles only to the extent that it can safeguard its own privileges and security, we would defend the right of

anti-imperialist struggles to defend themselves by any means—including Soviet weapons.

In the face of US imperialism’s military might the Castroites really had little choice but to seek Soviet aid. In this situation the IS fulminated with liberal pacifist rage. Once again the conflict was seen as simply a conflict between two imperialist superpowers:

“The terrible fact was that the Cuban people and the rest of us were held to ransom from both sides of the Iron Curtain. If that has not laid the myth that rocketry on one side of the curtain is somehow more humane and defensible than it is on the other, nothing short of war will.” (“Cuban lessons”, IS 10, Winter 62-63)

Once again, therefore, the third campists declared themselves against both the USA and the USSR. Young Guard raised the slogan: “All hands off Cuba, no war over Cuba.” (Young Guard No 13, November 1962) The pacifist Paul Foot denied any legitimacy to Soviet nuclear backing for Cuba. Instead he begged his readers:

“Socialists must ask the question: Why did Russia establish nuclear bases on Cuba and, more important, what political justification was there for doing it?” (Young Guard No 15)

In one sense he was right, his problem was that he could not answer his own set questions. In order to defend itself the Soviet bureaucracy was— in certain circumstances—prepared to extend that portion of the globe that is not directly open to imperialist exploitation. It does not do so because it is a revolutionary force but because the very property relations upon which it rests are in permanent antagonism with the interests and nature of world imperialism.

Soviet military backing for Cuba was not a nuclear umbrella for a capitalist price war. It was a means of increasing the strength of the Soviet bureaucracy through military advantage by underwriting the defence of another (degenerate) workers’ state.

NEITHER WASHINGTON NOR MOSCOW BUT VIETNAM?

The theory of state capitalism logically led the SRG and the IS to argue against support for anti-imperialist struggles that were led by Stalinists. On the surface therefore, the IS group’s support for the Vietnamese NLF’s struggle against US imperialism may seem either inconsistent or even a healthy break with the positions adopted on Korea and Cuba. This seeming inconsistency is easily explained by other consistent elements in the tradition and method of the Cliffites.

As a political tendency they have accommodated to every prevailing wind on the British left. Their position on Korea reflected, and adapted to, the fierce climate of Cold War anti-communism of the early 1950s. The Cuban missile crisis coincided with the growth of CND first time round. The IS

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 17

group’s denunciation of the nuclear arms race, their rejection of any legitimate role for nuclear weapons as a defence against imperialism reflects its accommodation to the CND milieu in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Things had changed quite drastically by the late 1960s, however. The Vietnam war had become an inspiration to thousands of youth. To have called for opposition to both North and South, and for a plague on the Stalinist-led Vietcong, would have been programmatically consistent for the IS. But with theoretical consistency threatening to isolate the IS the Cliffites threw themselves in behind “support for the NLF and a North Vietnamese victory”. (IS 32)

They declared the Vietnam War to be unlike previous Cold War conflicts:

“The Vietnam war does not fit neatly into the pattern of belligerent incidents between east and west since the war. Such incidents were often the result of direct confrontation between the major powers, each jostling for military or strategic advantage along the undemarcated border between their respective empires—the raw wound that ran through Central Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and South East Asia.” (IS 32)

The small scale of Soviet and Chinese backing at this time was sufficient for the IS group to salve their consciences and decide that China and the USSR were not involved. As a result of this view of Indo-China it was not difficult for the IS to immerse itself in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign as supporters of the Vietnamese Stalinists they had refused to support in the early 1950s.

In defending their decision to back the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong against the USA, the IS had to plumb the depths of state capitalist logic. The IS journal declared that it was giving support:

“In the same way, socialists were required in the nineteenth century to support bourgeois liberal movements against feudal or absolutist regimes.” (IS 32)

Only bourgeois tasks were on the agenda of the Vietnamese revolution:

“Of course, when the issue of American power is settled, we know what kind of regime and policies the NLF will choose—and be forced to choose by the logic of their situation. But that is, for the moment, another fight, the real fight for socialism.” (ibid, emphasis in original)

For the state capitalist theorists then, the fight against capitalism was -relegated as a later stage of the Vietnamese revolution.

The Vietnam episode brings to light another essential programmatic ingredient of state capitalist theory—its Menshevik position on the possibilities for socialist advance in the under-developed and “backward” countries. For the Mensheviks every ’ underdeveloped country had to experience a stage of bourgeois capitalist development.

The 1950s and 1960s saw important nationalist movements against imperialism in Egypt and Al-

18 WORKERS POWER

geria as well as in Indo-China. Large sections of the centrist and reformist left presumed that this signified a decisive shift in the terrain of the class struggle to a struggle between the “first” and “third” worlds. Against this impressionistic and defeatist “third worldism” the IS constructed their own, no less one-sided, metropolitan centred view of the world. The positions developed by the Cliff grouping in the 1950s and 1960s effectively deny the possibility of the struggle for socialism, for workers’ revolution in the semi-colonial world.

In his initial work on Russia Cliff had declared that state capitalism in Russia was inevitable given the revolution’s isolation and the need to industrialise in order to survive in a hostile environment. His analysis explicitly states that the only two realistic economic programmes open for Russia in the 1920s were private capitalism or state capitalism.

This is how he explains it:

“One solution to the conflict between state industry and individualist agriculture would have been to make the development of industry depend on the rate at which agricultural surpluses developed. It would have inevitably led to a victory of private capitalism throughout the economy. Alternatively the conflict between industry and agriculture might have been resolved by rapid industrialisation based on ‘primitive accumulation’ by expropriating the peasants and forcing them into large mechanised farms thus releasing labour power for industry and making agricultural surpluses available for the urban population.” (T Cliff, Russia: A Marxist Analysis, p97)

PROSPECTS FOR THE SEMI-COLONIES.

Cliff wrongly argued that the subordination of consumption to the accumulation of the means of production was ipso facto a capitalist task. The implications of this is that in societies where precapitalist modes of production dominate, or where capitalism is weak, a stage of private or state capitalism is inevitable, unless a revolution in such a country is accompanied by other revolutions in the advanced capitalist world.

This explains the apparent indifference that the IS showed at the prospects of a Stalinist victory in Vietnam—after all what else could be hoped for? Certainly not a genuine workers’ revolution.

The IS theorised this view systematically in the 1960s. It accompanied, necessarily, a thoroughgoing and explicit junking of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. By 1962 Michael Kidron was declaring that imperialism was now the “highest stage but one”, having been replaced as a world system by the “permanent arms economy” (i.e. military competition) as the fundamental motor maintaining stability and expansion in the major capitalist economies:

“It [Lenin’s imperialism} must be rejected on at

least four counts: finance capital is not nearly as important for and within the system as it was; the export of capital is no longer of great importance to the system; politica! control, in the direct sense meant by Lenin, is rapidly becoming dated; and finally, resulting from these, we don’t have imperialism but we still have capitalism . . . If anything it is the permanent war and arms economies that are ‘the highest stage of capitalism’. . .” (IS 20, Spring 1965)

Kidron argued that imperialism had suffered the loss of its colonies “without disaster, without indeed much dislocation or discomfort”. He even refers to the “spontaneous withdrawal of classic imperialism” from the colonies. Imperialist relationships, we are told, were being replaced by new relationships:

“Now, after independence, despite many points of friction and competition that remain, the overriding element is one of mutual independence and convenience.” (IS 20)

Leaving aside this bizarre view of the relationship between the imperialist and imperialised world which would do more credit to a White House briefing than an article written by a socialist, the programmatic implications for the underdeveloped world were stark. Whereas both Lenin and Trotsky had seen a vital role for the working class in leading the struggle against imperialism, because of the weakness of the national bourgeoisie and its enmeshing in world imperialism, now, according to Kidron, “the national bourgeoisie—or failing it, the national bureaucracy—has been rescued from oblivion by imperialism’s withdrawal”. (IS 20)

Kidron goes on to muse that it might well be that the only form through which capitalism can triumph, “in large sections of the world is through state initiative and bureaucratic state capitalism— and the destruction of its bourgeois democratic cousin and rival”. (IS 20)

One result of these developments he argues is “the growing irrelevance of national struggles”. If Kidron poses this development of state capitalism as a possibility, Tony Cliff has no such doubts. Drawing on the “experience” of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, Cliff states forthrightly that Trotsky’s perspective of permanent revolution, whereby the working class can lead the struggle of the oppressed masses both against imperialism and for socialism, is no longer tenable. Trotsky, he argues, was clearly wrong in assuming “the revolutionary character of the young working class” in these countries:

“In many cases the existence of a floating, amorphous majority of new workers with one foot in the countryside creates difficulties for autonomous proletarian organisations: lack of experience and illiteracy add to their weakness. This leads to yet another weakness: dependence on non-workers for leadership. Trade unions in the backward countries are almost always led by outsiders . . . Once the constantly revolutionary nature of the work-

ing class, the central pillar of Trotsky’s theory becomes suspect, the whole structure falls to pieces .... the peasantry cannot follow a non-revolutionary working class.” (“Permanent Revolution”, IS No 12 Spring 1963).

DEFLECTED PERMANENT REVOLUTION

In this situation according to Cliff, the intelligentsia of the underdeveloped world is ready and able to constitute itself as an embryonic new state capitalist class and “deflect” the permanent revolution into a stage of totalitarian state capitalist development. In Vietnam what was at stake was the construction of “a state-class, not a private or bourgeois class, that is spearheaded by the NLF and has already been instituted in the North.” (IS 32)

Throughout the underdeveloped world the intelligentsia:

*_.. care a lot for measures to drag their nation out of stagnation but very little for democracy. They embody the drive for industrialisation, for capital accumulation, for national resurgence. Their power is in direct relation to the feebleness of other classes, and their political nullity. All this makes totalitarian state capitalism a very attractive goal for intellectuals.” (IS 12)

So having distorted Mary’s analysis of capitalism, junked Lenin’s theory of imperialism and abandoned Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, the Cliff grouping rounds off its complete rejection of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky by abandoning the revolutionary potential of the working class in the vast majority of the globe! There only remains for these metropolitan chauvinists the “pure” working class of the advanced industrial world.

The leading theoreticians of the IS grouping here demonstrate once again the inability of their theory to provide a way forward for the international proletariat. The special nature and difficulties of the proletariat in the semi-colonial world are nothing new for revolutionaries. Indeed, despite Russia’s position as an “old” imperialist power, the country’s very backwardness meant that its working class showed many of the characteristics which Cliff believes should make us write off the revolutionary potential of the working class in the imperialised world.

The ability of the Bolsheviks to lead a socialist revolution in such a “backward” country was not, as Cliff believes, because of Lenin’s organisational genius, but because the Bolshevik party developed a political programme, tactics and strategy which was able to unite the working class behind a revolutionary perspective and draw the peasantry behind it. By rejecting the theory of imperialism and consequently seeing only the “growing irrelevance of national struggles”, the SWP abandons the major weapon in the fight for socialist revolution in the semi-colonies—it abandons the fight for working class leadership in the national struggles against imperialism.

THE POLITICS OF THESWP 19

But, of course, it is only to be expected from this grouping, steeped as it is in syndicalism and economism, that once they had decided the working class in the semi-colonies was not spontaneously revolutionary they would write off the possibilities of socialist revolution in these countries.

For Cliff, however, the non-revolutionary nature of the working class in these countries does not mean that there will be no revolution:

“A concatenation of national and international circumstances makes it imperative for the productive forces to break the fetters of feudalism and imperialism.” (ibid)

But these revolutions will not be led by the working class but by the much more cohesive “revolutionary intelligentsia” who are attracted to “totalitarian state capitalism”:

“These forces which should lead to a socialist workers’ revolution according to Trotsky’s theory can lead, in the absence of the revolutionary subject, the proletariat, to its opposite, state capitalism ... Mao and Castro’s rise to power are classic, the purest and most extreme demonstration of defiected permanent revolution. Other colonial revolutions—China, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Algeria etc. are deviations from the norm .. . but they can best be understood when approached from the standpoint of, and compared with the norm.” (ibid)

TROPICAL TROTSKYISM

So the best that the semi-colonial world can hope for in their struggles against the oppression of feudalism and imperialism is their replacement by some form, pure or otherwise, of “totalitarian state capitalism”. The only hope that the Cliffites offer for the masses of these countries is that in the “long run”, under these regimes they might well increase in “numbers, cohesion and social weight”. And presumably once they reach the level of the industrialised west they too can have a socialist revolution!

Thus in the mighty struggles against imperialism, in Algeria, in Cuba, in Vietnam and IndoChina, in Nicaragua and Central America today, the SWP’s programme offers no goal worth fighting for. They are left only with a chronic fatalism, with the belief that all these struggles can only end in tears, in a new exploiting, totalitarian system. This fatalism was most clearly summed up in a notorious article by Kidron on the LSSP of Ceylon (the LSSP was an ex-USFI section, then part of a “socialist” coalition government). Kidron argued in his article, entitled “Tropical Trotskyism”, that the difficulties facing Ceylon in escaping from semicolonial servitude were insurmountable.

This is all he had to offer the workers and peasants by way of perspectives:

“If the transition (to a modern competitive economy) is to be made at all—and it is undeniably necessary—productivity will have to be jacked up and wages held down. There is no alternative. All the LSSP can hope for is that the workers will make the sacrifice willingly.” (Socialist Worker, 3 July 1969)

it is a measure of the bankruptcy of state capitalist theory that what started life as a theorisation of moral outrage at the horrors of Stalin’s Russia became a rationalisation of the inevitability of state capitalism except in that portion of the globe where productive forces were ripe enough for the immediate transition to socialism.

State capitalist theory has proven itself to have no real understanding of the dynamics of international class struggle. On each occasion the state capitalists have done little more than retail the options and moods of western radicalism. It has led the Cliffites to adopt reactionary positions on major struggles in the post-war world. SWP members can either follow their leadership and prepare to repeat the old mistakes again, or they can take stock of the compromised history of state capitalism and look once again to the tradition embodied in Trotsky’s work.@

AFGHANISTAN

Ranged against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan stood the motley crew grouped in the Mujahedin. Led in the main by landowning tribal chiefs and divided over precisely which century they want to take Afghan society back to, this was the force the SWP backed

during the 1980s war. in an article from 1989 John McKee

explains why third campism forced the SWP to line up on the wrong side. 20 WORKERS POWER

On the side of reaction

&é HE SOVIET army didn’t start this war: they T walked into the one we already had going.” The PDPA member who sald this was right.

A civil war was raging in Afghanistan before the Kremlin sent in its troops. Nine years on, and with the Soviet troops now withdrawn, that very same civil war |s still going on. It Is poised to enter its

most decisive and bloody phase.

In 1980 when the Kremlin launched its invasion Workers Power recognised that the entry of Soviet troops had not changed the fundamental character of the internal Afghan clvil war. in that civil war it was the duty of revolutionaries to make clear which side they supported, which side we would call on the International proletariat to actively solidarise with.

Right now the Prime Minister of the provisional government established by the Mujahedin, is the extreme reactionary Abdur Rasul Sayaf, a member of the Wahhabi sect, backed by Saudi money. The Mujahedin chiefs are sanctioning the public stoning to death of women accused of adultery in their refugee camps. These are the “freedom fighters” that, astonishingly, the Socialist. Workers Party (SWP}, calls on workers to support.

A victory for these national “freedom fighters” would not result in liberation for the Afghan people. In fact, that “people” is divided along national lines already, The Mujahedin is mainly based on the most

numerous, Pushtun, population group InA nistan. Their triumph would intensify the oppression of the

minority peoples such as Baluchis, Tazhiks and Uzbeks.

At the moment the coalition of forces within the Mujahedin Js beset by tremendous frictions. So sharp

are the divisions that the recent attempt to hold a conclusive general council of tribal chiefs was

wrecked by them. If they could overcome these divisions they would, as Socialist Worker Review has rightly said:

“,.. probably produce a reactionary fundamental ist government well to the right of Khomeini. And this time it would be an American client.” (February 1988)

Ranged against this armed imperialist-backed reaction have been those elements supporting the regime of the PDPA. That regime was established in 1978 on a programme of democratic reforms. A Stalinist party, the PDPA, came to power in a coup that depended on its base in the officer ranks of the armed forces. It was, however, a coup that was initially popular among Afghanistan's small working class-——numbering 150,000 in the mid 1970s—and the teachers and students in the cities.

Initial attempts to Implement a programme of reform from above immediately met with resistance from the landlords and mullahs. The regime announced its Intention to abolish bride prices and arranged marrlages, to create new secular schools at which children would be taught their own lan guage first, and to cary through a land reform programme.

In a soclety where 40% of the population were landiess and only 20% of those with land had enough for subsistence, the land reform measures were central to any programme for meeting the immediate needs of Afghan peasants and nomads. But the Stalinist PDPA neither mobilised the rural masses in independent organisations to fight the landlords, nor did they provide the material means for implementing the reforms that they decreed from Kabul.

Decree number six abolished debts to richer farmers and landlords. But it did not touch the far more considerable debts of the peasants to the merchants and moneylenders. This was because the PDPA saw their “revolution” as a strictly antifeudal one and

did not wish to offend the powerful merchants of the bazaars. : ’

Decree number ei placed a Ilmit on land. own ership. But it did not provide the peasants with the seed, Implements and cash necessary to make land reform a reality. The majority remained tied to the landlords in sharecropping arrangements within the old tribal bounds,

In this situation the landlords were able to mobi lise tribal structures in many areas, into “a reactionary vendee”, a popular mobilisation for counterrevolutionary ends, as Workers Power described it In 1980.

The pressure of reaction, backed from the start by Pakistan and the USA, intensified the historic splits within Afghan Stalinism. Some, like Amin for example, wanted to increase the pressure of reform in order to make a direct transition from feudalism to “communism”. Others, like Babrak Karmal and Najibullah, wanted to slow down the whole process of modernisation.

The progressive side in the Afghan civil war was

itself riven with armed strife that threatend to de stroy the PDPA regime. It could not countenance

workers’ democracy to resolve these divisions, since such democracy would have threatened its own rule. Therefore, in classic Stalinist fashion, it resolved differences by bureaucratic-police measures and shoot outs.

it was in the context of the PDPA’s own disarray that the USSR intervened militarily to preserve a buffer state for itself in Afghanistan. In so doing they stifled the PDPA regime and its supporters, forcing them to jettison even their pretence at car rying through a reform programme. The land reform was halted as a result of Soviet pressure, but this succeeded only in emboldening the reactionary landlords and leaving the peasants with no reason to support the regime.

However, the Soviet troops, in the context of armed civil war, provided a degree of physical defence for those remaining forces committed to taking Afghanistan Into the twentieth century. In other words, the invasion did not alter the fact that the clvil war was between the forces of progress, even though led by Stalinists, and the forces of feudal reaction.

Yet, in 1980 the SWP immediately Joined in the chorus demanding Soviet withdrawal. They an nounced: “we say the Russian troops should get out of Afghanistan” (Socialist Review, 1980:3) and they've been saying so ever since. _

What was the correct line to take on the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and the withdrawal of So-

viet troops? From the very start we recognised that the Soviet troops did not go In to defend, let alone

extend, the democratic programme. Far from It. We recognised the troops were there to defend the Soviet bureaucracy's percelved self-interest In the region. That Is why our first response to the intervention made it clear that:

“An Independent force must be welded out of the tiny Afghan proletariat and the scattered forces of the poor peasants. That force must at every step jealously guard Its Independence from Karmal and Soviet Armed Forces. Its alm must be the revolutionary overthrow of the Karmal regime and the Soviet occupying forces.' (Workers Power 12, February 1980) ;

THE PGLITICS OF THE SWP 21

The key to defeating the forces of reaction lay in fighting for a leadership that had learned the lessons of, and broken from, Stalinism. We did not entrust that job to the Soviet Armed Forces (SAF).

For the SWP, though, there was never any alternative to Soviet withdrawal and a victory for Islamic reaction.

in 1980 they declared that “we don’t join in the hymns of praise in the press of the ‘freedom fighters’”. (Socialist Review, 1989:3)

Yet this never got in their way of actually urging their victory. As they have said more recently, the nature of the Mujahedin “shouldn’t fead socialists to see Russia's defeat as anything but a boost for our side.” (Socialist Worker, 11 February 1989}

As the towns are surrounded, as Kabul starves, as all those even faintly in favour of modemising Afghanistan face a horrible death at the hands of reaction, Socialist Worker calls Russian withdrawal “a welcome blow against imperialism”. And:

“Socialists everywhere should celebrate it for that reason. But it will not lead to even a mildly “progressive” government, and it will not bring peace.” (Socialist Worker Review February 1989)

To call for Soviet withdrawal, with its inexorable logic of supporting those who were fighting to force that withdrawal and advising PDPA supporters and workers to join in that fight, could only open the way for a victory for reaction. It could only weaken the chances of organising the progressive forces to chalienge both Stalinism and Islamic reaction, since it would pave the way for the physical destruction of those forces.

As long as the SAF afforded “the progressive forces in the Afghan civil war a degree of immediate physical defence from the barbaric ‘justice’ intended for them by reaction” (Workers Power 100, December 1987) it would be suicidal to turn one’s guns on the Soviet troops.

This suicidal road is precisely what the SWP advocate for Afghan workers and peasants. But then again the SWP, safely ensconced in modern, bourgeois democratic Britain, does not have to pay the

rice for such a policy. Its self-satisfled disregard for the concrete problems posed for the progressive forces In Afghanistan is a clear Indication that this British sect has no need for real proletarian internationalism.

We suspended the call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops until that moment when the Afghan workers and peasants could both effect that with

drawal and defend themselves against reaction. We warned of Soviet plans to carry out precisely the kind of treacherous withdrawal that has left the PDPA’s militias surrounded and beleaguered. Socialist Worker has been resigned to a right wing fundamentalist regime from day one.

The SWP is blinded by the fact that it sees the USSR as an equal and identical imperialist power to the USA. As a result it doesn’t care whether Afghanistan becomes what it expects it to become, an American client. Afghanistan as a US and, significantly, a Saudi client, can be used as a base for an Islamic crusade agalnst Soviet Central Asia. But for the SWP the Russian withdrawal is somehow “a welcome blow against Imperialism”.

It is a funny blow that will lead to the strengthening of imperialist influence in the whole region if the Mujahedin come to power.

The SWP is further blinded by the fact that it doesn't really think anything progressive, or anyone progressive, can exist in as backward a country as Afghanistan. All socialists should welcome the withdrawal they say. And what will come after it? A “cycle of misery” can only continue we are told:

“It won't be broken until genulne socialist revolutions In more advanced countries provide the resources to overcome Its economic backwardness.” (Socialist Worker 4 February 1989)

Socialist Worker urges us to celebrate the prospect that:

“The different ethnic groups will fight each other. The fundamentalists will fight the warlords and the warlords will fight each other.” (Socialist Worker Review, February 1989)

And the PDPA regime comes toppling down into the generalised misery and barbarism that the SWP have no alternative to. What a callous disregard for the fate of millions In Afghanistan and other backward countries.

The message of this for any Afghan revolutionary is indeed a bankrupt one. It is to give up or get yourself slaughtered. It is a reactionary one that offers no means whatever of stemming the tide of reaction and fundamentalism In Afghanistan. .

As true metropolitan chauvinists, blinded by their anti-Sovietism, the SWP condemn the defenders of Kabul, the PDPA militias, to death and destruction until the day the western workers take power and come to their rescue. This, as Lenin pointed out a long time ago in relation to backward Russia, is Menshevism.#

A parody of Leninism

NE STICK that SWP members repeatedly

beat the rest of the left with is that they

alone are “building the party”. Every week in Socialist Worker a column records the week’s new recruits and urges more to join the revolutionary party.

22 WORKERS POWER

Not a few books from the SWP stable—Volume One of Cliffs Lenin and Chris Harman’s The Lost Revolution to name but two—have as their theme the centrality of the party for the making of the revolution. Despite this breastbeating and dogged repetition of truisms, the ISSSWP have never un-

~—--—_——-- -—. ven

derstood the real nature of a revolutionary party on the Leninist model, let alone come close to building one.

In the days before Tony Cliff became a “Leninist” he openly espoused a Luxemburgist model of the revolutionary party. That is, he argued for a non-cadre, non-vanguard party, a party of the whole working class, organised on a federalist—as opposed to democratic centralist—basis. The first edition of his, subsequently doctored, pamphlet on Luxemburg stated:

“For Marxists, in the advanced industrial countries, Lenin’s original position can much less serve as a guide than Rosa Luxemburg’s, not withstanding her overstatement on the question of spontaneity.” (1959 edition Rosa Luxemburg).

Even after his supposed conversion to Leninism in 1968-69, Cliffs attachment to spontaneist notions of the party persisted as, for example, when he argued that Luxemburg’s position was superior to Lenin’s 1902-04 position “which was copied and given an added bureaucratic twist by Stalinists the world over”. (1969 edition of Rosa Luxemburg). In plain language Cliff is attributing the monoliths created by Stalinism to the model developed by the early Bolshevik Party.

The shift to a “Leninist” model of organisation by the Cliff group came in 1968-69. Cliff justified his previous federalist position on the grounds that the IS had been a propaganda group and “all branches were like the beads on a string”. (Neither Washington nor Moscow, Cliff, p.215). However, the shift to more agitational activity, he argued, necessitated a shift to democratic centralism.

The second justification for the shift was the defeat of the French general strike in May 1968. Cliff had empirically registered that a spontaneous mass strike (the biggest ever in Europe) had not produced the revolution. The reason had been the absence of a combat, that is, a “Leninist” party.

Both pretexts were based on an empirical method. Neither accounted for the actual shift in position in the Luxemburg pamphlet. The doctoring of the text (Cliffs right) was not in any way acknowledged or accounted for (Cliffs deceitfulness). As such the new turn to “the party” was not the result of a real understanding of the essence of the Leninist model. It was based on copying—-and distorting—the organisational form of that model.

Since their turn to “Leninism” the SWP tradition has developed a standard explanation of the need for a party. For example, Cliff wrote, in “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party”:

“For the achievement of a socialist revolution a revolutionary party is needed because of the uneven levels of culture and consciousness in different groups of workers. If the working class were ideologically homogeneous there would be no need for leadership.” (IS 58, p10)

This leaves out of account the question of political consciousness, the ideas about society, and about the state which are held by the workers. If the

class were ideologically homogeneous on the basis of wrong ideas, for example reformism, nationalism or even racism, there would obviously still be a need for communists to fight for the leadership of the class.

This would have to be done in such a way as to break workers from these ideas and win them to revolutionary communism. The crucial question is whether the working class can develop a revolutionary consciousness out of its own struggles. Cliff argues that it can; the problem is that different workers reach such consciousness at different times.

In What is to be done? Lenin argued most forcibly that the spontaneous ideology of the working class was trade unionism and that this meant “enslavement by the bourgeoisie”. The role of the party, argued Lenin, was to bring scientific socialism into the working class.

Of course, even in the supposedly one-sided What is to be done? Lenin recognised that the workers did spontaneously gravitate towards socialism, but the tasks of the party were to conquer and subordinate this spontaneity in order to transform it into revolutionary consciousness.

The SWP have made much of Lenin’s later comment that WAat is to be done? suffered from being a one-sided polemic against economism. Molyneux, following Cliff, argues that:

“If we accept Lenin’s formulation that revolutionary consciousness has to be brought into the working class then precious little is left of Marx’s fundamental dictum that ‘the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself.’ On the contrary, the role of the working class would be a strictly subordinate one.” (Marxism and the Party, p48)

This argument fails to understand either Lenin’s original argumentation or the one-sidedness that Lenin later identified.

What Molyneux wants is not to correct a certain polemical one-sidedness but to deny any validity in Lenin’s position. Molyneux believes that the spontaneous struggle can achieve revolutionary socialist consciousness:

“Indeed it was from the insurgent workers of Paris that Marx learned that the working class cannot simply take over the existing state machine but must smash it.” (ibid, p50)

In addition he cites the Chartists, the Russian workers of 1905 and similar examples of major working class political struggles to “prove” his point. Molyneux is merely parroting Cliff when he argues this. Indeed Cliff argues that Lenin reversed his 1902 position in 1905:

“Lenin had to protect his followers from allegiance to What is to be done? His formulation there of the relationship between spontaneity and organisation still bedevils the movement. Yet in 1905 he clearly reversed his position: ‘The working class is instinctively, spontaneously social-democratic...” (IS Journal May 1973—the break in the quotation

THE POLITICS OF THESWP 23

is Cliffs)

Here Cliff is not simply purblind—he is wilfully twisting Lenin’s actual position. The quotation above is much fuller and Lenin is more careful than Cliff suggests. Lenin points to the fact that in the 1905 upheavals the workers were fighting “in a purely Social] Democratic spirit” because:

“The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by Social Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness.” (Lenin, “The Reorganisation of the Party”, Collected Works vol 10, p32)

Far from being a change of position, this was entirely consistent with Lenin’s 1902 view that:

“Tt is often said that the working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism. This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory reveals the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory and for this reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily, provided however this theory does not itself yield to spontaneity, provided it subordinates spontaneity to itself.” (What is to be done?)

The SWP’s failure to understand the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness lies at the root of their false notion of the party. Take the examples, cited by Molyneux, of the Chartists, the Communards and the workers in the Soviets. These workers did not raise themselves to the level of revolutionary communist consciousness.

Certainly it was the Commune which provided Marx with the historical experience from which he—the revolutionary communist—generalised the theory of the state. That generalisation, which is essential for the development of a revolutionary strategy, was not made by the Communards, who were not led by communists.

Similarly the first Soviets, in 1905, did not raise the cal] for armed insurrection against Tsarism. The Bolsheviks did, and in Moscow they won workers to that position. Equally, it was the experience of 1905 which, much later, was generalised into a revolutionary strategy, “All power to the Soviets!”, by Lenin.

Their inability to understand the primary role of the party as the ideological vanguard of the class means that for the SWP the party plays a primarily organisational role. It simply links up existing struggles. Molyneux argues:

“The fact of workers achieving socialist consciousness spontaneously does not entail a return to the social-democratic gradualist view [of the party] for this consciousness does not develop gradually, accumulating steadily and inevitably. So the consciousness of the advanced socialist workers must be organised and centralised to increase to the maximum its influence within the ideologically heterogeneous class as a whole.” (Marxism and the Party, p50)

To argue against this idea is not, of course, to

24 WORKERS POWER

deny that the party does have a very important organisational role to play. However, if the ideological role, the role of political leadership, is ignored, then the precise nature of the organisational one is equally ignored. In order to fight effectively against capitalism and the capitalist state, particular forms of organisation of the working class are needed. What those forms are, for example, revolutionary trade unions, soviets, militias, etc, can be learnt from past and present struggles. But that is no guarantee that the working class will adopt them spontaneously or that it will adopt them in time.

The lessons of past battles have to be brought into today’s struggle because they have either been forgotten by today’s generation or have never been learned. If the party does not argue for the correct forms of organisation and methods of struggle (tactics) and against insufficient or wrong ideas then those wrong ideas that is, bourgeois ideas, will dominate.

The direct consequence of viewing the party merely as the “generaliser”, the weapon simply for the linking up of struggles, is a rejection of the idea of a cadre party. Consonant with his early positions on Luxemburg, Cliff has always (falsely) counterposed the broad mass party to the supposedly elitist vanguard party. For the IS/SWP, therefore, party building means opening the door to the masses on a minimal basis.

Ian Birchall defended this line in his ‘history of the party in the following terms:

“As had always been the practice in IS, the aim was to win recruits to the organisation on the basis of a minimum agreement on activity and leave the question of education and the wider aspects of IS politics to be developed in the process of work inside the organisation.”

He goes on to admit that many recruits were soon lost—he does not explain why—but insists:

“But there was no way this could be forecast in advance, no magic mark engraved on the foreheads of potential recruits.”

This is disgraceful. It is a recipe for deceiving potential recruits, diluting the political level of the organisation and demoralising members, causing them to drop out. It deceives people by recruiting them often on purely trade union grounds and then bewildering them in a branch meeting where political questions beyond their comprehension are debated.

It dilutes the organisation by bringing in people not trained or educated in the often complex problems of revolutionary Marxism, leaving them prey to demagogues, personal prejudices and so forth. It demoralises members, because more often than not they are unable to cope with life in a revolutionary organisation. They have not been trained, in advance, to deal with the many problems that this involves. The result: the IS and SWP bear responsibility for destroying probably thousands of potential revolutionaries as a result of their short

an ee

term opportunist membership policies.

Precisely because the party is a party of leaders it has got to be selective in its recruitment. It has to select, train and recruit people who can stay the course, people who, in their fields of work have the political culture to be able to lead others. In other words before it can become a mass party and in order that it may become a mass party, the party has to be a cadre party.

Cliff justifies the rejection of a cadre party on the grounds that it is inherently substitutionist. His essay “Trotsky on substitutionism”, written in 1960 and republished as recently as 1982, expresses this libertarian view of the party. He argues that there was a causal relationship between the Bolshevik organisation and counter-revolutionary Stalinism:

“However, if the state built by the Bolshevik Party reflected, not only the will of the party but of the total social reality in which the Bolsheviks found themselves, one should not draw the conclusion that there was no causal connection at all between Bolshevik centralism based on hierarchy of professional revolutionaries and the Stalinism of the future.”

He quotes Trotsky’s Menshevik position against Lenin approvingly. Trotsky wrote:

“The organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole, then the central committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.” Cliff comments:

“In Trotsky’s words about the danger of ‘substitutionism’ inherent in Lenin’s conception of the party organisation and his plea against uniformity, one can see his prophetic genius, his capacity to look ahead, to bring into a unified system every facet of life.”

THE PROBLEM OF SUBSTITUTIONISM

For Cliff, the Leninist conception of the democratic centralist party is inherently substitutionist. By saying this he is giving support to every anti-communist philistine who argues that Stalin simply took over and continued the work of the party of Lenin!

It is quite clear that, for Cliff, a Leninist party without a Lenin to run it is a dangerous monolith. Why else praise Trotsky’s “prophetic genius” instead of making clear Trotsky’s gross misconception. It was not the cadre organisation that was substitutionist, but the political programme of the Stalinists after Lenin’s death.

They substituted reliance on the Kuomintang znd British TUC officials for the building of a revo- “ationary party and the political independence of the working class. The reason Cliff ignores this tea] substitutionism is because for him the quessan of leadership in a programmatic sense is ir-

~svevant. Ironically, Cliffs distortion of the Leninist party

leads to substitutionism in the SWP. Real democratic centralism requires a real internal party life, an educated and involved membership and an accountable leadership. None of these things exist in the SWP. The leadership’s centrism precludes democratic centralism.

The established Cliffite leadership cannot afford to risk training a membership that could hold them to account. The history of expulsions and purges are eloquent testimonies of this. The result is a high turn-over of members, with the recruits from one period being sacrificed or demoralised during the next. This is a parody of democratic centralism. It substitutes the rule of the faction in the central committee for the real democratic centralist Leninist model.

This has been the situation in the SWP for many years. Each successive “turn” is accompanied by a significant loss of members who were recruited mainly, if not solely, on the practice of the preceding turn. Such comrades are accused of not being able to get out of the rut of routinism, of being conservative and too caught up in their own areas of work to be able to see the need for the party to reorientate.

In an immediate sense this may often be true but if this is the case then the fault lies primarily with the party leadership that allowed them to become routinist, single issue campaigners, not with the comrades themselves. Cliffs justification for this approach is based on the theory that the party is necessarily built by the leadership “bending the stick” in different directions as circumstances change.

Once more we find the quote-doctor Cliff enlisting Lenin as a supporter of party building via “bending the stick”. Cliff argues:

“The readiness to bend the stick far in one direction and then to reverse and bend it far in the opposite direction, a characteristic he had throughout his life, took clear form already at this early stage of his development as a revolutionary leader.”

And later on:

“He always makes clear the task of the day, repeating a thousand times what is needed, using the heaviest, thickest strokes to describe the tasks. Tomorrow, Lenin will recapture the balance, will unbend the stick and then bend it,in another direction.” (“From Marxist Circle to Agitation”, IS Journal 52, p22)

This picture of Lenin as the sole arbiter of the political practice of the Bolsheviks, the genius who twists and turns his organisation as he thinks fit, again leaves out of account the political strategy that guided Lenin. It is obvious that any leader needs to be able to shift the emphasis and the focus of work. This is true of the Pope, Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock. Lenin was able to do this extremely well and, it could be said, this made him a great leader, but it was not this that made him a great revolutionary leader.

It was his ability to fight for the communist pro-

THE POLITICS OF THE SUP =

gramme, stemming from his role as a part of a highly developed and trained cadre party, in all sorts of very different circumstances that made him this. In fact his changes of strategy, that is, of programme, were quite rare: the realisation of the bankruptcy of the Second International and the need to call for a Third, the de facio jettisoning of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” in favour of the strategy of permanent revolution after Apri] 1917, for example.

In short, Cliff believes that a Leninist party is only healthy if there is a Lenin in charge. If there is, then the party leader or leadership, operates by being able to swing from one direction to another at will. As Rosa Luxemburg put it (in another context) the membership develop the passive virtue of obedience.

DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM IN THE SWP

Naturally, the leadership of the SWP has to pay lip service to the norms of democratic centralism. Chris Harman’s essay, “Party and class”, is a case in point. The fact that he can give an account of democratic centralism that is formally correct on many points only makes the organisation’s practical trampling underfoot of these norms all the more shameful.

In talking about the concept of discipline, for example, Harman writes:

“Discipline for Lenin does not mean hiding differences that exist within the party but rather exposing them to the full light of day so as to argue them out.” (p17)

However for such conscious discipline to exist, which means every comrade being convinced, through argument and debate, of the line of the organisation, there must exist a machinery within

the organisation for conducting that argument and debate.

Yet the SWP does not have a regular internal bulletin in which the membership can air differences and expose them to the full light of day. It has three or four IBs in the weeks before a conference. Nor does the SWP accept the right of members who disagree with the line, and therefore, want to argue against it, to organise themselves as factions.

Such debate is essential and cannot be restricted, as in the SWP, to a “pre-conference period”. Political arguments do not conform to calendars, they are dictated by the course of events. By allowing only limited arguments against its chosen policy the leadership of the SWP ensures that it can prepare the membership to accept its position long in advance of any counter-argument. As a result the inner leadership acts, in fact, as a permanent faction. Not surprisingly it becomes ever more isolated from the pressure of the rank and file, and is increasingly restricted to the members of the apparatus of the organisation.

In every phase of its existence, the SWP Cliffites have got it wrong on the question of the party. On its role in the working class, its organisational principles and the criteria for membership, the SWP make fundamental mistakes and revisions. This why we attack them.

To the right of the SWP, Socialist Organiser and Socialist Outlook, criticise them for raising the call to build a revolutionary alternative to Labour. That is not our criticism. We are 100% for the building oF a revolutionary party as an alternative to La-

ur.

What we insist is that the SWP have not done that and, crucially, cannot do it. Workers Power can. Join us and help to build it.m

Would Trotsky have Joined the SWP?

The Socialist Workers Party has always made a point of distancing itself from “orthodox Trotskyism”. Rather than describe itself as a Trotskyist organisation it claims merely to stand in the tradition of Trotsky or to “stem from” Trotskyism . Arthur Merton examines this claim.

26 WORKERS POWER

not hard to find. When, in the late 1940s, Tony Cliff's grouping embraced a state capitalist analysis of the USSR, it began a process of rejecting all the essentials of Trotskyism. Permanent revolution was revised by Cliff in a manner that afforded the petit bourgeoisie of certain semi-colonies (India was his favourite example) a historic role in the struggle for “democracy”. The Transitional Programme (TP}, and its entire

Te reasons for the SWP’s attitude to Trotsky are

method were rejected in favour of a strictly militant trade-unionist practice in the class struggle. Trotsky’s struggle for a new international party was dismissed as a futile adventure which itself disoriented post-war Trotskyism.

The Cliffites justified their rejection of Trotskyism by pointing to the gross opportunism of the post-war Trotskyists. The Intemational Secretariat of the Fourth Intemational, led by Pablo and Mandel, and its rival, the International Committee (of Gery Healy fame), committed a whole series of political errors. These errors, though, stemmed not from the Trotskyism of these groupings, but from their definitive break from it. Unwilling to recognise this, the Ctiffites threw out the baby with the bathwater; the writings of the revolutionary leader with the writings of his confused imitators.

Of course the Cliffite groupings (Socialist Review Group/International Socialists/SWP) have always paid tribute to selected aspects of Trotsky’s politics, his grasp of tactics such as the united front, his understanding of fascism, his analysis of the popular front etc. These elements of Trotsky’s heritage will, rightly, be praised during the SWP’s jectures on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fl’s foundation. However, the question SWP members must face up to is whether the party’s break from the essentials of Trotskyism—in particular the TP and its method—has been compensated for by a superior revolutionary practice.

Workers Power, having once been a faction inside the IS, is convinced that the SWP are as guilty of trampling on the revolutionary programme as are the degenerate centrist fragments of the Fourth International.

We base this on our experience of the SWP’s practice in a whole range of major struggles—steel 1980, health 1982, Warrington 1983, miners 1984-5, printers 1986 and health 1988. In each case the SWP has steadfastly refused to raise demands that the workers themselves were not already raising. The SWP refused to give a lead to those workers when they came up against the limitations of both their spontaneous demands (their existing consciousness in other words) and their limited and sectional forms of organisation. in particular in the 1988 health dispute the SWP opposed steps towards a solidly based, national rank and file steward’s organisation.

The reasons the SWP give for their refusal to fight for the class to take up transitional demands vary. Recently it was because of the “downtum”. In the early 1970s it was because the “upturn” was automatically transforming workers’ consciousness. At root, however, the reason lies in their rejection of Trotsky’s programmatic method.

This shows through clearly in the major books that SWP leaders have written on Trotsky. John Molyneux has written the most serious and extended critique of Trotsky. from the point of view of the SWP. He argues that while Trotsky, especially through the experience of 1917, transcended many of the weaknesses of the Second Intemational tradition (as well as incorporating its strengths), there were important

residues of this method which left key aspects of Trotsky’s politics fatally flawed. ‘

Trotsky’s failure to understand the need for a combat party of revolution before 1917, his “brilliant failure” to grasp the sociat nature of the USSR under Stalin, his over mechanical attempt to map out all the stages of revolutionary strategy in the TP and his inflated view of the prospects for the Fourth Intema tional in the 1930s, are all “rooted in the deterministic interpretation that Trotsky inherited from the leading authorities of the Second Intemational”.

While he was evidently “permanently inocculated” from fatalism with regard to revolutionary policy after 1917, this “did not lead to a reassessment of his basic philosophical position which remained determinist and positivist”.

Molyneux, not surprisingly, singles out the TP for attack. It is, he writes, “to a far greater extent than many of Trotsky’s other works .. . both profoundty flawed and historically limited”. The criticisms he raises are themselves “profoundly flawed”. In the first place he criticises Trotsky's conception of productive forces in which he states that the economic prerequisites for revolution had already “achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind’s productive forces stagnate”. The SWP argue that this was only ever at best half true for the 1930s, that the whole edifice of transitional demands are tied to this view and thus only applicable in a period like the 1930s which was one “of revolutionary or near revolutionary situations”.

Whilst Trotsky’s perspectives were based on the idea that capitalism had now placed absolute limits on the productive forces, there was nothing fatalistic about his conclusions. He correctly identified the national limitations on the international economy as the source of World War | and its ensuing revolution ary possibilities, and pinpointed the very same contradiction as the source of two decades of stagnation and the drive to the Second World War. He wrote:

“Each nation tried to repulse all the others and to seize the world market for its own purposes. They could not succeed and now we see that capitalist society enters a new stage.”

On the basis of this he postulated only “socialism or barbarism” as immediate perspectives. Given that one nation, the USA, actually succeeded in “seizing the world market” there is clearly an error. But it is an error of analysis—the underestimation of the un tapped economic potential of the USA—entirely similar to the one committed by Mam and Engels who saw capitalism as exhausted in 1848.

Only once did Trotsky refer to a third possibility of @ potential respite for the bourgeoisie. In March, 1938 he argued, “‘that is not excluded, but then we will be obliged to realise a strategic retreat”.

The implication of Molyneux’s argument is that this

“strategic retreat” would have to involve abandoning the transitional method for the old maximum/minimum programme, tailored for a period of extended social peace.

This ignores the whole history of the development

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 27

of transitional demands and action programmes. It was precisely in a period of strategic retreat—after the First World War and the ebb of the revolutionary tide—that the Comintem elaborated transitional demands. After the Second World War and its thwarted revolutionary aftermath it was necessary to outline a new perspective, and refocus the TP to that perspective.

The new situation did not destroy the validity of the TP as a whole. This was because despite the “long boom”, imperialism could not escape and throw into reverse all the features of the imperialist epoch. It remained one of wars and revolutions, in which the uneven and combined development of world capitailism produced a whole series of crises in a whole series of countries—China, Korea, Algeria, Hungary, Indo-China, Indonesia, etc.

In each case transitional action programmes’ focused on the immediate crisis facing the workers and peasants of those countries, and directing their struggles towards the establishment of working class power, was essential.

Even in the imperialist west during that period of long boom, transitional demands and method did not lose their validity. The SWP claim that transitional demands do not strike “at the foundations of the bourgeois regime”, as Trotsky'’s programme envisaged, if the situation is stable. For the SWP the alternative, as expressed by Molyneux, is:

“In struggles in non-revolutionary situations (for example, a strike) it is more important for revolution aries to find demands that fit the situation, and therefore actually carry the struggte forward, than it is to search for demands which, in words, lead to the conquest of power, and in reality lead to irrelevance.”

It is true that the TP was written for a period in which the convulsive crises of the 1930s and the imminence of world war raised the possibility that partial struggles would rapidly lead to a situation of generalised working class action and to the question of poltical power being posed repeatedly in a number of countries. In these situations the whole range of demands from the factory committee right up to the workers’ militia and workers’ government could be expected to become a key question of agitation by the revolutionaries.

But outside of these situations the demands that need to be advanced agitationally still need to include ones that are imbued with the central method of the TP, namely, workers’ control. This is what Trotsky meant in the TP when he says:

“The present epoch is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-today work but because it permits this work to he carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution.”

The SWP caricature this statement from Trotsky. Not infrequently they accuse us of raising the dicta torship of the proletariat at a time when an all out strike is necessary. This caricature betrays a very dangerous short-sightedness on the part of the SWP. It fails to grasp that the fight, even for partial ete

28 WORKERS POWER

ments of workers’ control in a particular struggle, serves as a bridge between the struggle for reforms and a revolutionary struggle against capital.

Nor does Trotsky, as the SWP imply, counterpose partial demands and transitional demands. For Trotsky immediate demands fought for by revolutionary tactics could become the starting point for winning the masses to broader transitional demands:

“Every local, partial, economic demand must be an approach to a general demand in our transitional programme.”

And the fight for that demand can take forward the political and organisational struggle of the working class, even if it does not lead to mass revolutionary consciousness at once.

Take the example of nationalisation in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. We know it was not socialism, we know it was undertaken to rescue ailing capitalist industries. Revolutionaries would have emphasised agitationally the question of workers’ control over all aspects of the job (hiring and firing, safety, speed of work etc) and no compensation to the bosses. In other words it was possible, through encroaching on the rule of capital, to use workers’ control and the demand to make the bosses pay (by refusing them handouts) to prepare for future battles when renewed crisis made concessions and compromises less and less tenable for the bosses.

The SWP’s refusal to adopt such a measure actually leads them, not Trotsky or ourselves, to counterpose partial and transitional demands. Trotsky wrote:

“The Fourth International does not discard the programme of the old ‘minimal’ demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct, actual, that is, revolutionary perspective.”

This is what the SWP will not do. They never con nect the struggle for partial demands with a revolutionary perspective based on the fight for workers’ control. Rather they limit their demands to ones aimed at generalising working class support for the existing level of struggle and the spontaneously arising demands. It is implied in the SWP’s critique of the TP that they see some use for transitional demands in revolutionary or near revolutionary situations. But in fact they do not. Why? Because as Molyneux indicates, in quoting Gramsci favourably, it is possible “to foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle”.

This is nothing fess than a rejection of the scientific nature of the Marxist programme and the leading role of the party in drawing it up. If the party is the memory of the class then the programme codifies the general experience of the class intemationally and applies it in any situation.

The TP’s historic merit was that it outlined the major tactics that the working class will-have to deploy on the road to power. It did not and could not detail every minor conjunctural demand or concrete

expression of these general tactics.

In rejecting the whole programmatic method of Trotskyism it is the SWP who lapse back into a form of “Second tntemationalism”. They fall back into the rigid separation of minimum and maximum demands. At the moment this takes the form of combining a purely trade unionist practice with general propaganda for socialist ideas. The SWP are well known for devoting time and energy to providing organisational solidarity for workers who are in struggle.

The SWP see it as the key task of the revolutionary party to generalise support for that struggle on the basis of the existing level of demands. In the Great Strike of 1984-85 they argued that the way forward was primarily to build bigger and better pickets to fight for the demands of the strike. The limited na ture of these demands—iimited by the NUM leader ship—was never questioned. Only the leadership's failure to build bigger pickets was attacked.

The SWP justify such an approach by arguing that there is an inherent logic in the class struggle which turns economic struggles into political ones through the intervention of the state into economic battles (use of police, courts, jaws etc). Duncan Hallas, another SWP leader who has written a dook on Trotsky, has said:

“This political struggle can be carried through only on the basis, in the first place, of economic struggles, of sectional struggles. No magic general slogans can replace clear, realisitic and concrete leadership in these sectional struggles.”

The SWP are right to suggest that workers’ struggles can and do give rise to “spontaneous” political consciousness and are a key point of departure for revolutionaries seeking to win worker militants to a revolutionary party.

They are dead wrong to suggest that the political struggle emanating from this will be automatically revolutionary. As the miners’ strike showed only too well, the spontaneous political class consciousness of the majority never raised itself above that of the miltiant sectional trade unionism of Scargill. The strike was defeated for that reason.

The SWP did nothing to raise demands which were politically in advance of that consciousness. Even on the question of pickets they refused to call for their organised defence—despite the obvious need for such defence in the face of a militarised police force—on the grounds that such a demand was too advanced. In fact miners, who organised, albeit in a haphazard way, their own defence groups, were in advance of the SWP.

Inevitably the SWP’s attitude to programme has implications for their attitude towards the building of an intemational revolutionary tendency. In a nutshell the SWP reject the idea that an International can be built at present and go on to say that the Fourth Intemational (Fl) itself was a tragic mistake, that it should never have been built.

The whole evolution of the Cliffites since their split with the Fl in the late 1940s has been more and more towards a national-centred view of how to build

an International. Their starting point is to question whether or not Trotsky should have founded the Fi given the weakness of the groupings that constituted it in 1938.

In explaining Trosky’s insistence after 1936 that his followers found an International as soon as possible Molyneux ceclares that it was because “he needed an apocalyptic view of the future to sustain his revolutionary will” (pi85). A “now-or-never” outlook took hold of him and impaired his judgement. This is a rejection of Trotsky’s own justification; namely, that the struggle of the Left Opposition since the late 1920s had produced a wealth of analyses and documents that codified and welded together a coherent revolutionary pole of attraction.

In addition the imminence of world war required the creation of a democraticcentralist organisation and leadership capable of guiding the sections of the Fl in immensely difficult situations. And an Interna tional was vital if sections were to take advantage of the revolutionary crises as well as survive the repression that was expected to come with the war.

Duncan Hallas does concede some of these points but argues that Trotsky’s supposed “messianism” was a “necessary deviation from his mature view"— necessary to hold his followers together, but ultimately doomed to failure. This ignores completely the gain—in terms of maintenance of a revolutionary banner in the midst of the carnage and reaction of the war—that the foundation of the Fl represented.

The SWP insist that an Intemational can only be founded when it is rooted in strong national parties. The defeats of the 1930s had isolated the Trotskyists and according to Hallas the events of 1936 in Spain “had demonstrated the indispensability of parties rooted in their national working classes through a long period of struggle for partial demands” before launching an International.

Hallas tums cause and effect on its head. The events in Spain and particularly the regionalist and nationalist deviations that underiay the opportunism of the POUM testified to the need for an international party. As Trotsky said in the TP:

“A revolutionary proletarian tendency . . . cannot thrive and develop in one isolated country; on the very next day after its formation it must seek or create international ties, an international platform, because a guarantee of the correctness of the na tional road can only be found along this road. A ten dency which remains shut in nationally over a stretch of years condemns itself irrevocably to degeneration.”

The SWP itself is evidence of this. Real intemationalism begins with the “international platform” (i.e. programme) and a leadership which can intervene to correct the tendencies towards an adaptation to the prejudices and preoccupations of the national working class.

The SWP, with its persistent adaptation to the spontaneous trade union consciousness of the powerful British trade union movement, has degenerated along national fines. It is a degeneration that has led it on a variety of occasions (from Korea, through

THE POLITICS OF THESWP 29

Cuba to the Malvinas) into abstentionism or neutralism in relation to struggles between the USSR and imperialism and between the imperialists and semicolonies.

The project of building big national parties first is a guarantee that a genuine international programme cannot be constructed at all. The cost of such a project will inevitably be a view of international class struggles from the distorted lenses of the national terrain jeading to an over or underestimation of the weight and centrality of certain questions.

At best what is arrived at is a mutual admiration society in which a polite agreement is reached that the national groups know best about their own na tional class struggles and should be left to get on with them.

This bore fruit for the SWP in its disastrous mid 1970s attempt to unite “nationally rooted” groups as diverse as the Maoist Avanguardia Operaia (Italy), the guerilarist PRB-BR (Portugal) and the abstract propagandist Lutte Ouvriére (France).

From the point of view of this fiasco the SWP have nothing to teach Trotskyists or those struggling to refound a revotutionary International.

The SWP is not a Trotskyist group. In effect they want to have their cake and eat it. Duncan Hallas concludes that Trotsky's lifelong struggle was “an indispensabie contribution” to the synthesis of theory and practice. Yet of the four main areas of Trotsky’s thought he identifies—permanent revolution,

Stalinism, strategy and tactics, party and class—the SWP’s theory and practice is seriously at odds with all of them.

We only have to consider the contradiction be tween Trotsky’s support for the USSR against Germany in the Second World War and the SWP’s underStanding of it as an inter-imperialist war to see the fragility of their veneration for the FI’s founder.

Given their position on the USSR should they not brand Trotsky as a social chauvinist defending Russian imperialism—despite his previous contribution to Manism?

By attacking Trotsky’s programmatic method, and hence his intemational strategy for working class power, the SWP’s defence of certain of his conjunctural analyses and tactics is rendered shallow and inconsistent.

It is possible and necessary to be sharply critical of Trotsky’s weaknesses as jong as we know how to correct them on the basis of his method. But it is the method of Trotsky that the SWP critics find most objectionable.

Trotskyism needs to be re-elaborated certainly, but that can only be done by understanding the full importance of Trotsky’s contribution

The crowning point of that contribution was the completion of the TP and the founding of the FI, which Trotsky himself judged to be “the most important work of my life”.

THE SWP AND ECONOMISM

What is to be done?

the question economism can’t answer

OST OF the SWP’s critics level the charge of economism at them. But the failure of these self same critics to orient themselves in the largest mass workers’ organisations—the trade unions—has discredited this correct charge. When the student vanguardists, the feminists and the Trotskyist-Bennites demonstrate, in words and deeds, their aversion for the “backward, white male skilled working class” they completely undermine

30 WORKERS POWER

Many members of the Socialist Workers Party have heard their organisation accused of “economism”. But what does it mean exactly? Clare Heath looks at the origin of this term in Lenin’s polemics at the turn of the century and finds that it is an accurate label for the SWP’s approach to struggles as diverse as the strike against Heath’s Tory government in the 1970s to the Poll Tax battle of the late 1980s and early 1990s

their criticism of the SWP.

Indeed their “politics” are simply the obverse side of the coin of the SWP. In different ways both represent a “slavish bowing to spontaneity”. Lenin’s charge against the economist trend in the Russian Social Democracy.

The SWP theoreticians have a holy terror of Lenin’s pamphlet What Is To Be Done?. “Economism” is caricatured as “opposition to building a

revolutionary party” or the ignoring of political questions. Since the SWP is not guilty of either of these they insist they cannot be accused of economism. Cliff attempts to discredit What Is To Be Done? by claiming that Lenin “overemphasised the difference between spontaneity and consciousness”, that Lenin’s supposed “complete separation of spontaneity and consciousness is mechanical and nondialectical” and that Lenin later admitted this to be the case.

Cliff wishes to hold fast to the proposition that “an economic demand, if it is sectional, is defined as ‘economic’ in Marx’s terms. But if the same demand is made of the state, it is political”. Cliff asserts the internal evolutionary logic of the economic struggle:

“In many cases economic (sectional) struggles do not give rise to political (class wide) struggles, but there is no Chinese wal] between the two, and many economic struggles do spill over into politieal ones.” (Tony Cliff, Lenin vol 1, p80-82)

Duncan Hallas, writing in 1973 explains this with respect to the events of 1972:

“Thus the builders’ strike was an economic movement: the strike to free the Pentonville Five, a political movement, a successful non-sectional struggle to coerce the ruling class. But the origin of the Pentonville struggle was the Midland Cold Store dispute; a very economic, very sectional dispute—an attempt to protect the jobs of registered dockers against cheaper labour. The economic struggle led, in this case, to a political struggle and generally speaking this is usually how political, class wide actions—other than purely electoral ones—develop.” (International Socialism, No 56, first series) .

From this supposed law of development Hallas asks and answers the question:

“How do revolutionary socialists get into positions, gain the authority, that commands a hearing? By serious, active and persistent struggle on these issues that actually concern their fellow workers, maintained consistently over time. And these issues will be economic issues, sectional issues, issues of conditions, bonuses, gradings, wage rates and, at one remove, union politics.”

For Hallas this means concentrating on giving a “better, more successful, lead on the concrete day to day, bread and butter issues, than their nonrevolutionary fellows.” There is no fear that this will make revolutionaries indistinguishable from pure and simple trade union militants because of an inherent logic propelling economic struggles into political ones; a logic provided by government intervention into the economic sphere (via “incomes policy”, police on the picket line, anti-union laws ete, etc). Thus Hallas concludes:

“This political struggle can be carried through only on the basis, in the first place, of economic struggles, of sectional struggles. No magic general slogans can replace clear, realistic and concrete leadership in these sectional struggles. The cen-

tral slogans have to arise from these and generalise them.” ;

Now economism is not the “absence of politics”. Lenin makes this clear in What Is To Be Done? The economist “. . . does not altogether repudiate the political struggle.” Lenin cites economist writings that talk about “combating the government”. Lenin however points out that the economist believes that “politics always obediently follows economics”. He continues:

“If by politics is meant Social Democratic politics [i.e. socialist or communist politics] then the theses of [the economists] are utterly incorrect. The economic struggle of the workers is very often connected with bourgeois politics, clerical politics etc. [The economists] theses are correct, if by politics is meant trade union politics, viz the common striving of all workers to secure from the government measures for alleviating the distress to which their conditions give rise, but which do not abolish that condition, i.e. which do not remove the subjugation of labour to capital.”

Lenin concludes:

“There is politics and and politics. Thus we see that [the economists’ position] does not so much deny the politica] struggle as it bows to its spontaneity, to its unconsciousness. While fully recognising the political struggle, which arises spontaneously from the working class movement itself, it absolutely refuses independently to work out a specifically Social Democratic politics . . .”

SPONTANAEITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Lenin notes the economists’ charges against the Iskra tendency of “setting up their programme against the movement.” Against this he replies that it is the task of Marxists to:

“,.. Yaise the (spontaneous) movement to the level of its programme’. Surely it is not its function to drag at the tail of the movement.”

Lenin in no way denies that the working class’ “spontaneity”—i.e. the militancy that grows out of the very conditions and struggles that arise from its exploited position under capitalism—develops class consciousness. Nor does he deny that the economic struggle has a “spontaneous” tendency towards politics. What he does say in the famous and wilfully misunderstood quotation is that:

“Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” (our emphasis)

This quotation, along with Lenin’s observation that “there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement”, draws attention to the fact that the creation of a workers’ movement with socialist consciousness, and a socialist programme is a conscious, active task, not a “spontaneous” one.

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 31

The raising of spontaneous class struggle, whether “economic” or “political”, into socialist consciousness is an indispensable task and one which only a vanguard party can undertake.

None of this is in contradiction with a correct appreciation of the revolutionary creativity of the masses. But if workers spontaneously engage in epic class struggles, spontaneously create soviets and spontaneously erupt into insurrection they also—and necessarily for longer periods—spontaneously succumb to bourgeois ideology. Lenin’s attack is on those who tail the economic struggle and who, in the name of “spontaneity”, denigrate socialist class consciousness. He attacks those who will not develop a specifically socialist programme, strategy and tactics and will not struggle to win the “mass movement” to it, to raise the struggle from the “day-to-day bread and butter issues” (Hallas).

Cliff likes to pretend that Lenin left all the immature nonsense of What Is To Be Done? behind once he had seen the mass movement of 1905. These words from that year refute him:

“We cannot be be content to have our tactical slogans limp behind events and to their being adapted to events after their occurrence. We must have slogans that lead us forward, light up the path before us, and raise us above the immediate tasks of the movement. To wage a consistent and sustained struggle the party of the proletariat cannot determine its tactics from occasion to occasion. In its tactical decisions it must combine fidelity to the principles of Marxism with due regard for the progressive tasks of the proletariat.” (“Revolution teaches”, 1905)

The SWP’s objection to What Is To Be Done? is, in essence, their objection to Leninism itself. Once {before 1968) this was overt and consistent. The IS objected to the democratic centralist party structure which was the organised expression of the Leninist method of theoretical, political and economic struggle. Yet Cliffs later acceptance of the formalities and terminology of Leninism hides a deep hostility to its programme and method.

Of a piece with this is the SWP’s rejection of Trotsky’s and the Communist International’s utilisation of transitional demands. Thus Duncan Hallas objects to the Transitional Programme. He quotes Trotsky’s famous statement that:

“It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

And then he goes on with condescending irony:

“Whether or not it is possible to find slogans or ‘demands’ that meet these exacting specifications depends, very obviously on circumstances. If at a

32 WORKERS POWER

given time ‘today’s consciousness of wide layers’ is decidedly non-revolutionary, then it will not be transformed by slogans. Changes in actual conditions are needed. The problem at each stage is to find and advance those slogans which not only strike a chord in at least some sections of the class (ideally of course, the whole of it) but which are also capable of leading to working class actions. Often they will not be transitional in terms of Trotsky’s very restricted definition:

“Of course Trotsky cannot be held responsible for the tendency of most of his followers to fetishize the notion of transitional demands, and even the specific demands of the 1938 programme—most obviously the ‘sliding scale of wages’. The emphasis he gave to this matter was, however, excessive and encouraged the belief that ‘demands’ have some value independently of revolutionary organisation of the working class.” (Trotsky’s Marxism, p104)

Behind the SWP’s hostility to “slogans and demands”, especially transitional ones, lies their total inability to see beyond the horizon of the immediate economic or trade union political struggles. Thus they present themselves as specialist advisers on action (invariably militant trade union tactics), on generalisation, (solidarity action between sectional struggles up to, but no further than “mass strike action”) and on organisation (where they advocate joining the party to link together the rank and file militants.)

AGITATION AND PROPAGANDA

Traditionally the SWP therefore attempts to avoid political issues that are not immediately posed in working class economic struggle. Either they try to ignore questions such as Ireland, women and race altogether, or if that will not work then they trim their positions to keep them in line with prevalent consciousness.

They did this on Ireland for example, when they refused to call for the withdrawal of British troops when Labour originally sent them in. They denounced the 1972 Aldershot bombings as “individual terrorism” despite their formal position of unconditional but critical support for the IRA. The alternative to this in the SWP leaders’ book is to set up a “separate” campaign or paper on the issue to keep in with those concerned about. That is what happened with Women’s Voice and the AntiNazi League, for example.

The agitation of the SWP consists of “calls to action” to continue and step up existing struggles with realistic, i.e. immediately realisable, goals. Alongside this the SWP maintains a separate diet of propaganda aimed at exposing the evils of capitalism and presenting necessarily abstract arguments for socialism and workers’ control.

Agitation and propaganda occupy the distinct and separate terrains of “action now” and passive education for the “Great day a’commin” precisely because the SWP rejects the method and tradition

represented by the Transitional Programme. It has no programme to take the working class from its present struggles to the creation of workers’ power. They once produced a draft programme but it never got beyond the internal bulletin.

In reality their programme is split into a maximumAninimum one, as much as that of the traditional social democracy. There is only one major difference; the Social Democratic minimum programme glorifies the terrain of electoral politics and leaves economic struggle as the exclusive business of the unions.

The SWP does the exact reverse. The SWP loyalists will object that they stress the “self-activity”, the direct action, the do-it-yourself approach. This is true but when sectional trade union militancy, or even mass direct action for trade union political ends, develops to the fullest extent it indeed poses questions such as the political general strike, who rules in society, and how to really deprive the bosses of political and economic power.

Only the socialist programme contains the answer to these questions. This answer is not an abstract one of “socialism”, but a series of demands, methods of organisation, and goals of struggle, which go further than the existing everyday demands and slogans of the movement. Communist propaganda has to prepare the ground for the fight for these demands and slogans. If these answers are not given, if these slogans are not raised, if a new leadership does not emerge on the basis of a strategy and tactics which are a leap forward for the class, then bourgeois answers will be given by the existing union and Labour leaders.

That this is the case is shown by the fact that the “spontaneous” continuation of the militant struggles of the early 1970s was the Labour Government of 1974. In this period of militant trade union struggles, both political and economic, the International Socialists (IS) were unable and unwilling to offer an independent action programme which led from these remarkable struggles (the Kill the Bill strikes and demonstrations, the builders’, postal workers’, and two miners’ strikes and the mass political strike over the Pentonville jailings) to the question of working class power. Instead they tailed every one of these struggles claiming each would “bring down the Tories”.

Thus after the miners’ stirring victory over the Tories in early 1972, after mass pickets and widespread solidarity action had demonstrated a mass class hostility to the Tories, the IS were still trying to keep the struggle at its existing economic level and even at its existing sectional level. True they “lent the struggle itself a political character”. They said that the struggle had a political character, but offered no more this that comforting description.

THE REJECTION OF TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS Atypical front page of Socialist Worker in the 1972

miners’ strike—under the bold headline “Demand the TUC calls a general strike”—said:

“If the miners do not win their full claim, demand that the TUC calls a one day general strike of all affiliated unions against the Tory lockout.” (Socialist Worker No 259, 19.2.72)

When, after the 1972 victory, the miners were in the firing line again the SWP was still tailing, and indeed advocating tailism for most of the working class:

“The powerful battalions of the trade unions can organise to smash Phase Three. They can blast a hole through which every other section can march. It is a defeat which this Tory government of riches for the few and misery for the many could not survive.”

During the Pentonville jailings in mid-1972 the IS did not manage to call for a general strike until after the TUC had threatened to call one. And even then, true to form they avoided like the plague the “political” and “too advanced” slogan of a general strike to smash the Industrial Relations Act.

Faced with rampant double figure inflation in this period Socialist Worker could not get beyond “Pay: use your muscle for more!”. It again renounced, cursing with bell, book and candle, the sliding scale of wages because such a slogan, if granted (a big if indeed!), might put a stop to the wages’ struggle. ;

In fact if the working class, or even substantial sections, took up and fought for this generalised, class wide slogan on wages, it would have been a clearly politica} slogan. Even if—in exceptional circumstances—it had been conceded it would have been a ceaseless bone of contention with a government and an employing class determined to lower wages and bring down inflation at the workers’ expense.

Forms of the sliding scale have been fought for, won and fought over in massive struggles in Italy, Belgium and the USA. Even Heath’s indexation fraud linked to the last phase of his incomes policy, and preserved by Labour, when triggered by inflation rates far in excess of the threshold Heath had thought safe, led to a rash of strikes by poorly organised, often women, workers. Here again the actual spontaneity of the workers proved to be more advanced than the tailism of the IS.

Above all what the Cliffite economist schema fails to realise is that the vacuum it leaves, where there should be the fight for a communist action programme—including as well as transitional demands, immediate economic and political (democratic) ones—is filled in life by reformism. Thus the SWP has no alternative, even at the pinnacle of struggle, except to grind its teeth and “Vote Labour with no illusions”.

Economism is helpless when faced with bourgeois politics in the working class, which in Britain takes the form of Labourism. The SWP hates it, curses it, wishes it dead and develops theories to prove that it is. Yet each time the SWP thinks

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 33

that the Hercules of working class self-activity has hurled it to the ground (the early 1970s) it rises up again with renewed force, even temporarily subduing the economic struggle.

The SWP cannot comprehend that this is because political reformism is the true born son of the trade union struggle. It renews its strength constantly from it. The miners’ militancy put Wilson and Benn into office in 1974.They then turned on the miners and did all they could to ensure that never again would they find themselves returned to office in such an extra-parliamentary fashion.

But it is also true that illusions in Labour and electoralism are not just a product of trade union victories. It also occurs as a result of serious defeats. Witness the Great Miners’ Strike of 198485. The Labour Party leadership in its majority ran away for the duration of the dispute. They were embarrassed by it; they worked behind the scenes to get it called off.

But once the miners’ were defeated then the vanguard gradually became infected with “new realism” and disillusion set in about the possibilities of victories against the Tories on the industrial/trade union front of the class war. In turn, working for a Labour victory, even with much reduced expectations in what it will do in office, became the order of the day. It was, and is more and more, accepted that only a Labour victory at elections will stand a chance of unseating Thatcher.

DOWNTURNISM

In order to justify their economism the SWP have constructed a theoretical and perspectival alibi; the downturn theory. A report from a party council in May 1990 summarised its essence. It stated that there was an upturn of struggle from 1970 to 1974:

“Then from 1975 onwards there was a downturn both in the industrial struggle and in left wing politics.”

To use one of Cliffs favourite phrases, the downturn theory is “bloody rubbish”. It bears no relation to the reality of the 1970s and 1980s. How is it possible for people who have lived through the past 15 years to describe them as ones of “industrial downturn”?

We have witnessed mass struggles under Labour (notably the strikes of car workers, lorry drivers and whole swathes of the public sector in 1978 and 1979). Under the Tories some of the most momentous strikes in British labour movement history have taken place. Engineers, steel workers, health workers, civil servants, miners, printers, seafarers and dockers have all done battle in this period. The miners’ one year struggle was a milestone of working class militancy.

Yet the SWP insist that because of the downturn these strikes were doomed to defeat. We are clear that the key battles did go down to defeat. This has produced periods in which militancy has

34 WORKERS POWER

been considerably subdued. But none of this was inevitable. The struggle itself threw up the possibility of victory. The reformist misleadership consistently squandered that opportunity. Correct and vigorous revolutionary politics, intersecting with the rank and file militancy of these disputes, could, on various occasions, have prevented defeat. Such is the dialectic of the living struggle. Its outcome is not predetermined by the arbitrary perspectival schema of a left group.

Faced with this reality the SWP stretched the downturn theory to the point of incredulity. During the miners’ strike Tony Cliff argued:

“The miners’ strike is an extreme example of what we in the Socialist Workers Party have called the ‘downturn’ in the movement.”

This absurd position was justified by the fact that the strike was a defensive one—it was defending jobs. Yet the occupation of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilding yard, which according to Cliff “radically turned the tide of the Tory attack” in 1971, was equally defensive. It came just after the defeat of two national groups of workers—power workers and postal workers. Why was this not an extreme example of a “downturn”?

Many strikes in many periods are defensive, yet they can rally the forces for a fightback, turn the tide from retreat to advance, alter the balance of class forces. There was nothing inherent in the struggle of the UCS workers, led as they were by treacherous Stalinists who tried to turn it into a popular frontist jamboree, that made it an “upturn” strike. Nor was there anything inherent in the miners’ strike that meant defeat was the inevitable outcome.

What was a problem was that, as a result of their false perspective, the SWP argued vigorously that it was impossible to organise the rank and file in the disputes of the later 1970s and 1980s. They had decided to wind up every one of their rank and file organisations and vowed not to get involved in any other ones—such as the National Rank and File Miners’ Movement that emerged from the Great Strike. This meant that the misleadership of the reformists went unchallenged by an organisation that had, at least in the past, developed extensive roots inside the working class. The SWP in 1984 insisted that:

“What is clear is that the idea that you could create an alternative leadership in the downturn by revolutionaries coming together in some kind of rank and file organisation did not work.”

In place of this the SWP retreated in on itself. It structured its organisation around branch meetings with a high educational content to steel members against the corrosive effects of the downturn.All of this avoided the real problem of both the class struggle in the 1980s and the SWP’s politics within the rank and file organisations that they were winding up. The problem was not an absence of class struggle nor an unwillingness of rank and file workers—who were not yet revolu-

organise themselves against the ‘The strikes of the 1980s demonstrate both the extent of rank and file militancy and the

“The way to stop arrests like this is to spread mass pickets as far as is possible and stretch the

operation.” At Wapping in 1986 the same refusal by the SWP to advance demands and forms of organisa-

the position of deputy leader in 1981. This was of course a reformist movement. But it offered a very good opportunity for revolutionaries. The illusions of militant workers in left reformiam could be put to a sharp test through a revolutionary intervention into the Bennite movement. A political struggle occupied the attention of thousands of worker militants. The SWP turned

away from left i They had defined politics narrowly as the polities of the When the centre of gravity

shifted to the Lebour Party they had nothing to

say. And throughout the 1980s this abstentionism was their hallmark. They were afraid to comprothat those politics were abstract and had no rele-

Moreover, like all abstract and inoperable “hard” politics, they were no protection from the effects of opportunism. They were not operable against opportunism. Underlying the SWP’s abstentionism was their fear of lasing people to the Bennite movement.

spite the SWP’s new perspective of a new mood in the class struggle. One single demonstrates this clearly—the Poll Tax. Here we have a generalised attack on the whole working class. It Yequires a general, political answer. The SWP themselves believe that it holds the possibility of being the means to drive Thatcher from affice. Even leaving aside their previous hostility to non-payment—which kept them sidelines in the first phase of the campaign-—their answers are just as inadequate in this “new mood” struggle.Nowhere do we the tax itself by the working class. Nowhere do we find them advancing the cal] for a general strike. Nowhere do we find them arguing for workers’ defence squads against the bailiffs. despite the new situation, we get the same old solutions. All we need to do ia wage a militant trade union struggle. The Pall Tax, Socialist Worker informs us, is not really anything different from other economic attacks: “The government's assault on our living standards through the Poll Tax, welfare cuts and rent

every area to link the struggles and fight the tax on a class wide basis—necessary to defeat the Tories. And this is excused by the SWP by their ravings about Thatcher ruining herself and getting into problems from which she cannot extricate herself from.

The Poll Tax positions of the SWP are merely the latest attempt to turn a political struggle into a bread and butter issue that the SWP feels at home with. But whether we are facing wage

struggles, resistance to sackings or the imposition of a hated tax, political struggles do not begin only at the ultimate limit of the bread and butter struggle.

They begin with revolutionaries transforming those struggles—not by slogans alone—by winning leadership on the basis of policies and tactics, encapsulated in revolutionary slogans, which can transform spontaneous action into a conscious political struggle for working class power.

New mood, same politics

In 1988 the “new mood” joined “the downturn” as one of the stock phrases in every Socialist Workers Party member's vocabulary. The new mood was the silver

lining to the dark cloud of the downturn.

Pauline Smith explains why the change in perspective has not led to any fundamental change in the SWP’s practice.

the existing fevel of consciousness and struggle

at all times. It is one of the features of what Lenin called “economism”. In the period of recession and defeat, when workers’ spontaneous militancy had been seriously undermined by unemployment and the antiunion laws, the SWP developed the “downturn perspective” was the resuit.

it saw the SWP, whose halimark had been the rank and file movement tactic, become consistent opponents of rank and file organisation. SWP members resigned their stewardships and sang the same funeral hymn over every defeated strike:

“We can only fight for the little things, tea breaks and toilet rolis. At the same time we can make propaganda for socialism”.

In the last few months, though, the tune has changed.

As a new mood of militancy really has gripped sections of workers—in Vickers, Jaguar, the post, the NHS and some sections of local government— the SWP’s line became more and more at odds with workers’ willingness to fight. SWP members in Lambeth NALGO for example argued strike action was impossible, argued against It, only to find it taking place within days.

The fact that the “new mood” was discovered in 1988, with 1:86 million strike days in the first seven months compared to 3-18 million In the same period last year, reveals the “turn” for what it is. It Is more of a tonic for the troops and a correction of overzealous pessimism than a serious analysis of the situation and the tactics needed.

Further evidence of what the “new mood” means can be gleaned from reports of the SWP’s recent conference:

“Our job is to take the struggle as far forward as possible. That means starting from what the rank and file can do because that has an impact on the trade. union leaders.”

36 WORKERS POWER

‘| SWP’s political method consists of tailing

The health dispute is a clear example of what this means. In February and March, when thousands struck on days of action and ancillarles and nurses were in dispute together the “new mood” was not even a twinkle in Tony Cliff's eye. So the SWP op posed the call for an all out strike. —

The resurgence of action in the NHS, coinciding with the “new mood” schema at first prompted the SWP to Issue a national leaflet calling for an all out strike. With four hospitals on Indefinite strike it looked like an all out strike was something “the rank and file can do”. By the time the first national rank and file meeting took place the SWP had not only dropped the call for an all out strike but voted against it in their union branches.

As always they had begun from trying to guess the level of workers’ consciousness, not by fighting for what was necessary. in the nurses’ dispute the suspension of the appeals procedure, the problem this creates for the work to grade and the intranst gence of the Tories mean that only an all out strike will win.

But to get an all out strike nurses will have to build it from above and below. As well as trying to spread and consolidate the action on the ground they will have to mobilise to force the leaders to call an all out strike. For this they need rank and fille organisation on a national scale. But even a national strike committee proved “too far ahead of workers” for the SWP.

The SWP's attitude to the new mood of militancy is only a fine tuning of the do-nothing position of the fast three years. It also embodies thelr sterile and one-sided view of relations with the union bureaucracy.

Against some of thelr members, who argued against placing any demands on the officials, the SWP have argued that workers must place demands on the bureaucracy at the same time as spreading the action from below. But from Frickiey to the post

and the NHS they have refused to spell out how these demands are to be focused against the lead ership.

Why? Because only an organisation of rank and flle militants, the minority whose ideas on the Issues of the day are ahead of the mass of workers, can effectively fight against the bureaucrats, to take control of the action and replace leaders who betray with those who will fight.

The bankruptcy of the SWP in the fight against new realism In general could not be better Illus-

trated than by its recipe to “rebuild the strength of union organisation from the bottom up”. It calls for shop stewards, regular meetings, solidarity etc. All well and good, but it says nothing about how to wrest control of the unions from the present pack of traitors.

There may be a small but important change in workers’ ability and desire to fight. But the SWP’s “new mood” perspective holds no answers to the vital question it poses: how to turn the anger into action.@

No strategy to win

“We live in exciting times” Socialist Worker told its members in it's party column in May 1990. True enough. But in exciting times it is the duty of revolutionary Marxists to give a sober assessment of the situation and point the way forward for the

working class.

The Socialist Workers Party, argues Arthur Merton in this article from June 1990,

has once again proved it can do neither.

the new mood of resistance to Thatcherism. We

agree with the SWP when they say that it marks a new stage in the Tory offensive because it is a generalised attack:

“Now their generatised attacks have provoked a generalised response.” (Socialist Worker Review, April 1990)

But the whole question boils down to this—how can we transform a generalised response into a conscious, generalised struggle against the Tories? it is a question the SWP ignores because it believes this transformation will happen spontaneously.

So at the same time as it spreads the message “We can win” Socialist Worker (SW) consistently fails to answer the question: how?

Within the anti-Poll Tax campaign the SWP has long been aware of the limitations of a passive mass non-payment campaign. It has fought correctly for nonimptementation by council workers.

But neither mass nonpayment nor non-collection on their own have the power to beat the Poll Tax. if successful they will immediately come up against the courts, the police, the bailiffs.

Faced with this the workers involved will need to generalise the action by caliing for mass political strike action.

But instead of a strategy to overcome the limita tions of nonpayment and non-collection the SWP only emphasises one over the other.

It emphasises non-collection on the basis that workers are strongest in the workplace. Correct. That means that the workplace is the place where we

p:.. TAX tax struggle has been at the centre of

must aim to generalise the struggle, with demands aimed at the biggest possible mass strike action against the tax.

But the SWP’s focus on the workplace leads in the opposite direction. In place of the generat strike we get a call for nonimplementation by NALGO members. Instead of a generalising demand the SWP put forward the idea that a relatively small section of council workers are the key to sinking Thatcher's flagship.

“The workers who collect the Poll Tax have the power to smash it.” (SW 19.5.90)

The SWP has wrongly treated council workers’ action against new working conditions created by the tax as if they were struggles against the tax itself.

The Greenwich strike for better pay and conditions by Poll Tax collectors offers an excellent opportunity to argue that the workers involved should refuse to collect the tax, even if they win on pay and conditions. Instead the SWP has insisted that the strike is in fact already an anti-Poll Tax strike. But whatever the support workers are receiving from non-payers, however much the strikers hate the tax individually the strike could be settled if managers give in to the limited demands of the Greenwich workers.

But you will find nothing in the pages of Socialist Worker waming of this danger, arguing for a strategy to tum Greenwich and other strikes into strikes against the tax itself. Instead it simply cheers on the workers: “Greenwich shows the way”.

To link the anger that exists against the Poll Tax with workers’ struggles for better wages, stimulated by big mortgage and Poll Tax bills, we need to over-

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 37

come the sectional, economic limits lodged within all of these spheres of struggle.

We need to focus the anger of each into a con scious campaign against the Poll Tax itself. The SWP thinks so too:

“The coming wages struggles must be turned into a generalised political fightback against the Tories.” (SW, 7.4.90)

“Take every opportunity to link wage demands with the Poll Tax, rent and mortgage rate rises.” (SW, 14.4.90)

The problem is that they consistently refuse to fight for a strategy that can bring this about.

In workplaces and union branches the spontaneous way many workers “link” these attacks is to say: “I'm paying my Poll Tax, my rent/mortgage has gone up so 1 need a pay rise”. Up and down the country the SWP has been echoing these arguments, rather than trying to replace them with revolutionary argu ments and tactics. .

Concretely the way to link pay and Poli Tax struggles is to build organisations that can link workers in the workplace with those on the estates.

We need to fight for councils of action, as the means of co-ordinating and linking the separate struggles. We need to build defence squads to protect the non-payers and workers’ demonstrations from the state. We need to fuse the struggles around the demand for a general strike against the Poll Tax itself,

The SWP clearly realises the potential for a generalised counter-offensive to drive the Tories from office:

“Hf the anger over the Poll Tax is linked with the rising determination to fight over wages and conditions not only will workers win decent pay rises but they can sweep the Tories away.”

How? By winning decent pay rises all at once? Clearly not. The answer, as any revolutionary socialist should know, is by jaunching a general strike which links pay, conditions, Poll Tax, benefit cuts, unemployment together. and which brings into being delegate councils of action representing every seéction of the working class.

But for economism this is much too far in advance of the workers’ present consciousness. So for all the SWP’s excitement we are never told just how the potential to drive the Tories from office can be realised.

The deliberate pay off workers have been given by

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whole number of employers, with settlements above the rate of inflation, shoots a hole through the entire argument that fighting hard on every sectional front of struggle spontaneously feads to generalisation. And the SWP, in the face of such settlements, is left with nothing to say to power workers, rail workers, engineers, retail workers and construction workers who have all recently settled.

Finally the SWP's economism has led them to a hopelessly one-sided view of the Tory crisis. Just as in the “downturn” they thought it was impossible for workers to win major class battles, now it seems impossible for them to lose. The Tories have “no obvious way out of their immediate difficulties” claims the May issue of Socialist Worker Review.

The Tories certainly do face a severe crisis. But to suggest that it is inescapabie leaves workers disoriented when the limitations of the spontaneous struggies against the Tories lead to partial retreats and reverses.

On the eve of the council elections Socialist Worker told its readers:

“This week was Thatcher's worst ever, but next week will be worse. After the local elections comes the likelihood of official inflation topping 10%.”

One week later Thatcher had limited the electoral damage with big Tory swings in London, staved off an immediate leadership challenge, quieted Tory calls to scrap the tax and gone on the offensive against high spending Labour councils. And inflation failed to reach 10%.

Socialist Worker urged workers “Don't let her off the hook”. But for the moment, because of the inadequacy of the spontaneously generated tactics the misieadership of the Labour and trade union leaders struggle, they already had.

Buoyed by the certainty that Thatcher’s days are numbered, the SWP has refused to advocate a Strategy that could really generalise the fightback. its revolutionary sounding calls to “Get the Tories out” become empty rhetoric for the benefit of the SWP members, not a fighting strategy for millions of workers.

“Thatcher's policies are in ruins, her government in disarray. We don't need to wait for Kinnock to re place her. We can do that right away.” (SW, 5.5.90)

But still this begs the question—how? Socialist Worker has no coherent answer.@

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Syndicalism’s fear of the bureaucracy

It might at first sight seem curious to accuse the Socialist Workers Party of syndicalism. After all is it not a party? But Colin Lloyd argues that in fact the SWP has a thoroughly syndicalist notion of the rank and file movement and the struggie -

for union democracy.

HE SWP is certainly not a classically anarcho-

syndicalist formation. Does it not openly pro-

claim its goal to be state power for the working class—even insisting that without soviets and workers’ control of production there can be no workers’ state? The classic anarcho-syndicalists denied the need for either political action or the proletarian dictatorship. Yet the pre-1914 French CGT, or American IWW were by no means the only syndicalist formations.

English “industrial syndicalism” and the De Leonite Socialist Labour parties on both sides of the Atlantic eclectically combined a syndicalist practice in the unions with parties devoted to making propaganda, including electoral propaganda. -

In essence the SWP has no clear or consistent commitment to the struggle to oust the trade union bureaucracy and to replace the present reformist leaders with revolutionary ones. Instead the SWP looks to the de-centralising syndicalist idea of a system of democratic checks over leaders.

In the (unpublished) International Socialist’s (IS) programme we find the slogan of “workers’ control over the unions”. Workers’ control over production, a system as Trotsky said of dual power in the factory, of control] over management is possible in a period of pre-revolutionary crisis and may extend for some period after the seizure of power as a school for workers’ management under a centrally planned economy.

Certainly we seek to check, control, limit the sel] outs and betrayals of the trade union bureaucrats, but a system of checks and balances over them is not our goal. Our goal is a communist leadership in transformed fighting industrial unions. Communists fight for a structure of workplace union branches and factory committees which are capable of creating action councils in heightened periods of class struggle and can develop in a revolutionary situation into workers councils (soviets).

Communist do not hide their party label from

the mass of workers but openly form fractions in the existing unions. They willingly form united fronts with non-ccommunist rank and file workers who wish to fight for militant policies and trade union democracy. This united front may be episodic and local or long lasting and national.

The best example in Britain was the National Minority Movement in its earliest years and the various reform movements, vigilance committees and rank and file groups which preceded it. Democracy and openness about party affiliation and party policy is, however, a jealously guarded right for communists even when, or rather especially when, it is the leading tendency in such a movement, for these formations remain united fronts and not parties.

Freedom of criticism alone enables the workers to select and reselect the leaders and the policies proven correct in struggle. The history of the IS/ SWP’s attempts at rank and file organisation indicate the foreigness of this tradition to them.

TAILING THE STRUGGLES OF THE CLASS

In 1966 the IS focused its attention on the relationship between shop stewards—whose numbers had increased enormously during and after the war—and the trade union bureaucracy. The IS recognised that the Labour government’s attempts to impose incomes policies and anti-union laws was causing stewards to move into action against a reformist government. In response to this rift the IS published a book by Tony Cliff and Colin Barker called Incomes policy, legislation and shop stewards.

Despite their current insistence that in the 196c they were not calling for a rank and file movemec: (see Alex Callinicos’ mendacious account in I. Autumn 1982) this book did put forward an ea-> version of the rank and file movement slogae, = argued that the principal problem with the r_-- tant shop stewards was the fragmentatios, of =e

THE POLITICS OF INE SEP =:

struggles’ and the. consequent narrow horizons. Their reformist consciousness was recognised but not regarded as a major problem by Cliff. Ever the optimist’ he’ said: that it was fortunately being whittled away:

“The importance of state sponsored, central reforms has been declining; today the workers have less to gain and less to hope for from national reforms. And thus the role of their national representatives, the Labour MPs, has been declining too.” (op cit,p126)

Workers were turning instead to the shop floor and the shop stewards to get “do-it-yourself reforms’-—better piece work rates, bonuses, holidays and so on. While admitting that the consciousness Tevealed by this process remained reformist, Cliff argued that since it was reformism located in the shop floor and based on self-activity it was thereby spontaneously “destroying the tradition of reformism from abeve” (ibid, p135) i.e. the Labour Party.

The tasks that fowed from this ‘analysis weré of course to encourage shop floor “reformism”, but at the same time to overcome the fragmentation of the stewards’ movement and thereby finish the working class’ lingering belief in reformism from above:

“The principal tasks of socialists are to-do what we can to unify the working class and to encourage the movement from below.” (ibid, pl135)

This unity was to take the form of a national shop stewards’ movement.

This whole analysis was short sighted and impressionistic. It was certainly true that workers looked to shop floor organisation and bargaining as the main means of achieving economic gains in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not true that this shifting locus of reformism, as IS called it, sounded the death knell of the Labour Party.

Indeed when economic crisis, mass unemployment and inflation, on the one hand, and statutory wage freezes, cuts in social services and attacks by the law on hitherto established trade union rights replaced the boom conditions of the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s the need for state wide, governmental answers would come to the fore.

Before this situation became critical there lay five years in which the shop floor militants of the 1960s were able to utilise their stewards’ organisation for an effective fightback. These were the halcyon days for Cliffs prognosis and practice. But the problem of the Labour Party—reformism from above—was not, indeed could not be, resolved by reformism from below.

Yet IS blithely continued to keep politics to a minimum in its trade union work. In 1970 a second major book by Cliff was launched. In 230 pages Cliff described in detail the nature of productivity deals and spelt out a trade union programme on how to'fight them: In oné‘and a half pages at the end in’ section entitled “Politics” it was asserted that “We need a revolutionary socialist movement”

40 WORKERS POWER

(p232). No connection between this asserted need and the struggle against productivity deals was made in practice.

Trade unionism and politics were’ presented:as separate entities. In their practice in-this period the IS followed Cliffs cue. In the struggle to free the jailed Pentonville Five dockers the IS refused to demand that the TUC call a general strike despite the mass strike movement that was erupting to free the dockers. Symptomatically they refused out of the fear of TUC misleadership! Mass sympathy strikes by the tank and file were in their view safer. —

Only when the TUC itself called a one day general strike did the IS shamefacedly see fit to raise the call. Thus they tailed not only the working class, but inevitably, the bureaucracy. Morbid fear of the bureaucrats, attempts to avoid rather than challenge and break their influence led to capitulation to it. Also in the miners’ strike of 1972 despite extensive rank and file self-organisation and strength,-and despite the existence of a right wing leadership the IS refused to call for or build a rank and file movement during the strike. They cheered on Scargill’s militancy but would not attempt to organise the rank and file during the strike. They claimed that after the strike, that is outside of the context of struggle, they would cal] a conference around their paper, The Collier.

During the early 1970s the IS did gain recruits amongst workers, thanks to their energetic intervention in workers’ struggles and because they voiced these workers’ views. Generally they did not hold onto those recruits for very long and the dream of IS filling the vacuum on the left as a mass alternative to Labour did not materialise.

To overcome this failure to become a mass alternative, the IS increasingly turned towards the building of rank and file movements, around newspapers, in particular industries—the mines, London Transport, amongst teachers, amongst car workers and others. Encouraged by the winding down of the Communist Party’s “rank and file” movement, the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Union, consequent to their capture of a number of unions, IS in 1974 decided to launch a National Rank and File Movement (NRFM).

This was conceived as a bridge to the party for advanced militants, and a means whereby a tiny party could play a big role. Tony Cliff described the relationship between the party, the rank and file movement and the mass of workers as a series of cog wheels—a small one, the party, setting in motion a larger one, the NRFM, setting in motion a larger one again, the mass of workers. The mechanical analogy was apt because the relationship was conceived of as mechanical rather than political. The party was simply one element of the

“unifying” process, | ‘not the political leadership of the NRFM.

Cliff forgot that the big cog wheel turned under the motive force of economic and political crisis.

When in 1974 a very powerful crisis rolled the working class in the direction of a Labour Government, the great cog-wheel tore the teeth of the other two in sequence. The rank and fileists fell back under the influence of the new left leaders. The IS “members” passed back over the bridge to staff the rank and file groups.

In the Callinicos article referred to earlier, the author described the NRFM as stillborn. He is right, but whereas he blames this on the objective state of the class struggle at the time (the beginning of the downturn) we blame the politics of the IS/SWP. The organisation built the NRFM on a syndicalist basis. The refusal to direct workers into a conscious conflict with “reformism from above”— the Labour Party—was justified on the grounds that it was already discredited in the eyes of the workers.

On the eve of Labour's election victory in early 1974 Andreas Nagliati, the IS industrial organiser at the time, wrote:

“The traditional party of the working class, the Labour Party, is an empty shell organisationally and in terms of active involvement. Politically it is so discredited that even the Tories’ vicious antiworking class measures have not really restored it to working class favour.” (ISJ, February 1974)

The conference called by the rank and file papers—the Carworker, Collier, Platform, NUT Rank and File etc—in March 1974 downgraded any discussion of the political situation facing the working class under. Resolutions put forward by the Workers Fight group on racism and workers’ contro] and nationalisation, were all opposed by IS and given short shrift at the stage managed conference. -

The programme adopted at the conference was one of militant trade union demands. The IS itself decided in advance that it would not fight openly for its own socialist policies, for fear of scaring away militants. At some stage in the unspecified future, IS claimed it would raise its politics. The logic of this syndicalist approach was explained by Nagliati. Writing of the non-aligned militants he argued:

“What can bind them together is a programme of fighting around certain minimal demands— against wage freeze and incomes policy, for an end to the Industrial Relations Act and laws against picketing, for democratisation of the unions, for a fighting policy on wages. In this lies the rationale for the rank and file organisation.” (ISJ February 1974)

The 1974 conference gave birth to the NRFM. It was as “united front” controlled by supposed revolutionaries who were boycotting their own politics within it and supressing anybody else’s! They simply joined in with the militants at the conference in relating particular experiences from their workplace. The meeting was more ofa rally than a working conference to discuss strategy and tactics for militants in the light of the fall of Heath and

the election of a Labour government.

Fear of reformism and the political incapacity to fight it prevented IS from raising and discussing the question of strategy and tactics in relation to the Labour Government. Realism, or rather a deep feeling of their own impotence, stopped IS from posing itself as “the alternative leadership”. Of course at the end of the day an IS speaker stood up and sang the praises of socialism (much as Cliff did at the end of his productivity deals book), but it had little bearing on the strategy of the NRFM.

The second conference of the NRFM took place later in the same year. In the meantime Wilson had been re-elected. Yet again, however, these developments did little to affect the nature of the conference. It followed the same recipe as the first and with the same results. The IS leadership were eager to avoid a discussion in the NRFM of what they often scornfully referred to as “big politics”.

The modest success of the two conferences— approximately 500 delegates to each—reinforced the political modesty of IS. An internal bulletin in April 1975 recognised that the NRFM was not “strong enough to launch independent action” but argued that a serious campaign to root the NRFM in the localities would overcome this in the short term. The IS firmly believed that the “honeymoon” with Labour was merely the prelude to a “big bang” and the resumption of militant struggle.

This perspective was rooted in IS’s false understanding of the nature of the trade union bureaucracy and its hold over the workers’ movement. IS hates the bureaucracy. Its vivid expression of this hatred gains it the sympathy of those workers sold out and betrayed by the bureaucrats. But the IS/ SWP does not understand how to defeat the bureaucrats—its hatred is based on fear and fear leads them to seek a way around or behind the backs of the union leaders.

This incomprehension dates back to Cliffs “Economic roots of reformism”, an article written for Socialist Review in June 1957. Here Lenin’s theory of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy is grotesquely caricatured and smugly rejected:

“A small] thin crust of conservatism hides the revolutionary urges of the mass of workers. Any break through this would reveal a surging revolutionary lava. The role of the revolutionary party is simply to show the mass of the workers that their interests are betrayed by the ‘infinitesimal minority’ of ‘aristocracy of labour’.” (Neither Washington Nor Moscow, 109)

Cliff then mobilised the apparently knock down argument that the mass of workers are in fact teformist in their consciousness. Brushing aside, with a few inconsequential statistics, the very idea that the skilled workers benefit differentially from imperialist super-exploitation he alights on the much simpler argument:

“The expansion of capitalism through imperialism made it possible for the trade unions and Labour Parties to wrest concessions for the work-

THE POLITICS OF THESWP 41

ers from capitalism without overthrowing it. This gives rise to a large reformist bureaucracy which in its turn becomes a brake on the revolutionary development of the working class. The major function of this bureaucracy is to serve as a go-between between the workers and the bosses, to mediate, negotiate agreements between them, and ‘keep the peace’ between the classes. .

“But the trade union and the Labour Party bureaucracy are effective in disciplining the working class in the long run only to the extent that the economic conditions of the workers themselves are tolerable. In the final. analysis the base of reforms is in capitalist prosperity.” Gbid, p115-6, emphasis in original)

The conclusion then flows:

“When capitalism however, decays to the extent that any serious demands of the working class reach beyond its limits, the bell will toll for reformism.” (ibid, p117)

This theory is false on all counts. As a critique of Lenin it is nonsense. Lenin did not hold that the working class was a constant “revolutionary class”, spontaneously ready to erupt but held back by a thin layer. He did hold—with Marx—that the proletariat had no objective and intrinsic ties to capitalist private property and that the demands of the profit system constantly led (though obviously not continuously) to collisions between the workers and the capitalists.

Obviously there are periods of boom and slump of expansion and contradiction which affect the frequency, scope and direction of the class struggle. But what Lenin was asserting was that under imperialism a sizeable stratum of skilled workers had emerged, well paid, with the conditions of life of a comfortable petit bourgeoisie which had made its peace with capitalism.

Disproportionately represented in the unions they were a conservative force on which the union xScialdom could erect a bureaucratic structure. This frustrated the democracy of the mass of the spembers and often excluded the mass of non-unsonised or unemployed workers. This theory explains how it is possible for the union bureaucracy to maintain its hold even in periods of crisis when capitalism manifestly cannot meet the “serious demands” of the working class—indeed when it claws back previous concessions. Such clawback periods—1920-23, 1929-33, since 1979—do not in any sense automatically undermine the bureaucracy because the workers as a whole are no longer prosperous.

THE NATURE OF THE UNION BUREAUCRACY

Cliffs theory tends to obscure the communists’ concentration on the mass of the proletariat, our concern for the interests of the class as a whole. This includes relating to its most oppressed and exploited sections the unskilled, the unorganised, the unemployed, women, immigrants—regarded

42 WORKERS POWER

not as “minorities” but as part of the majority of the proletariat with nothing to lose but their chains. Of course, the well organised, militant sections provide invaluable cadre for the labour movement but without taking up and fusing with the majority of the class this minority remains a base for the bureaucracy.

For Alex Callinicos the bureaucracy is not based on any really existing social forces. Rather it is the natural result of the bargaining process. This is because the bargaining process necessitates organisation and organisation breeds bureaucratism:

“A division of labour naturally and spontaneously emerges between the mass of workers and their representatives, whose time is increasingly spent in bargaining with the employers.” (ISJ autumn 1982, our emphasis)

And:

“The trade unions even if they are born out of elemental struggles between labour and capital, inevitably produce a layer of full time officials whose task it is to negotiate a compromise hetween the two classes” (Callinicos, The revolutionary road to socialism, our emphasis)

This analysis, which owes more to the bourgeois sociologist Michel, and his iron law of oligarchy, or the Webbs, than it does to Marx and Lenin, leads to a shallow, contingent hostility to the bureaucrats. It leads to a self-defeating attempt to bypass the official leadership, and a completely one-sided stress on self-activity and self-organisation, not as means to challenge and replace the bureaucrats, but to offset or control them.

Thus Cliff in an article written in July 1971, “The bureaucracy today” (ISJ 48, first series) concludes:

“The struggle for democracy in the unions—regular elections of all officials, the right to recall them, giving them the average pay of the workers they represent get, the decision on the conduct of all strikes to be taken by mass meetings of workers, ete—will become of cardinal importance. A vacillating bureaucracy needs the steady, controlling hand of the rank and file.”

These formulations, and other like them in the pages of SWP publications, are based on the Clyde Workers’ Committee declaration:

“We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.”

Now while this stress on the independence of the rank and file is fine so far as it goes, it does not go far enough. It leaves out—and given the Clyde Workers’ Committee was dominated by industrial syndicalists this is not surprising—an organised political challenge to the officials with the objective of wresting the national unions from their control and replacing them with a revolutionary leadership subject to rank and file democracy.

From a communist standpoint, i.e. from that of the need for a political struggle to overthrow the

bourgeoisie and its state power—Cliffs position is hopeless. Union democracy is necessary not merely to prevent sell-outs now, but to bind the bureaucracy’s hands. Workers need the full use of that centralised national union apparatus to make their struggles more effective. They need a “general staff of labour” that leads, mobilises and fights, instead of today’s tame cat TUC.

Therefore the bureaucracy must be dissolved and replaced with a militant communist leadership. Such leaders would both guard and promote the democracy which alone really makes the unions schools of struggle, schools of socialism. But they would also have a positive duty.

The rank and file also vacillates. The job of communist leadership is to answer the fears of the rank and file, overcome their vacillations and mobilise them for struggle. To blather about “selfactivity” or spontaneity is to cover up one’s total lack of direction . The working class will not thank, and more importantly will not choose, “advisers” who just flatter their “self-activity” or “spontaneity”. The IS, because it feared, and had no tactics to defeat and replace, the bureaucrats, effectively put a sign-board up on their rank and file groups:“No bureaucrats need apply”, “Officials keep out!”. This is what the IS/SWP propaganda about the fat salaTies and perks of office amounted to. The method of the united front and of demands placed upon bureaucrats like Scargill was absolutely beyond them.

It might “sow illusions”, “reduce self-reliance and self-activity”. So it left these bureaucrats free to cultivate their (enormous) influence over the rank and file whilst the IS contented itself with the tiny handful who would break with them as a first step.

FEAR OF OPPORTUNISM

Like their argument about Labour Party membership—to go in is to be defiled, it leads to capitulation—in the rank and file movement the IS exclude the “Jeaders” because it feared the reflection or shadow of its own opportunism. Their horror of contamination masks a deep inner feeling that they have no strategy distinct from or inconsistent with that of the left bureaucrats.

In the struggle with the officials, revolutionary politics as a guide to action are absolutely decisive. An action programme for the unions can rally the membership and defend its interests against the bosses and the officials who try to sell these interests short. It can mobilise the forces to oust the reformist bureaucracy and clear the way for the transformation of the trade unions into organs of revolutionary struggle, instead of being organs for domesticating the workers. In the course of doing this, revolutionaries strive to win the leadership of the rank and file movement and the trade unions as a whole.

The SWP’s syndicalism has always prevented

them from beginning such a struggle. Their conception of the NRFM as a body of militants grouped on a self-limiting trade union programme, always meant that they had to conceal their politics within the NRFM, fine words about the socialist millenium notwithstanding.

They could not connect these fine words with the policies of Labour. Every rank and file programme that ever emerged from the IS/SWP stable was based on minimum demands, while those willing to subscribe to socialism (always posed in an abstract and maximalist manner) could join the party. This concept of the NRFM was increasingly untenable under Labour.

It was usless in equipping militants to fight Jones {TGWU) and Scanlon (AUEW) in the unions and Wilson and Callaghan in the government. Militant shop-floor reformism was redundant under these - circumstances. Not surprisingly, the SWP turned away from the NFRM and towards the Right to Work Campaign. This was launched by the NRFM, but by the SWP’s admission, the child gobbled up the parent.

It was a campaign of isolated actions and marches which mobilised the angry jobless youth and unleashed them at TUC congresses. The youth obliged by kicking the shins of the despicable timeservers. While one can sympathise with the sentiments of the youth who did the kicking, what this whole RTWC period reflected was the SWP’s turn away from building rank and file organisations on the shop floor. Nor did it represent a real fight to get the unions to organise the unemployed. It was an expression of their inability to answer the problems of militants.

Thus from 1974 to 1977 the NRFM faded into obscurity. Then in 1977 it was wheeled out for a conference in November during the firefighter’s strike. The SWP hoped, opportunistically, to cash in on this strike by relaunching the NRFM. However, the daily bulletin produced by the SWP in the name of a mythical firefighter’s rank and file group repeated all the errors of the early 1970s. More and more militancy, bigger and bigger pickets were urged, but the problems of mobilising other sections of the public sector and fighting the TUC which engineered a sell-out, were not answered.

The last gasp of the NRFM came in 1979, in June after the Tories had won the election. This was conceived by Tony Cliff as an anti-Tory rally, not a serious revival of the NRFM. He was opposed in this conception by the industrial organiser, Steve Jeffreys. However the conference, as a rally, was a great success. Over a thousand attended it (double the attendance at previous gatherings).

But its political content marked the low point of the SWP’s economism. It launched a campaign around a “Code of Practice”. This called on workers not to cross picket lines, not to break the closed shop, and to observe trade union norms. Yes, i: was the old refrain, basic trade unionism.

THE POLITICS OF THESWP <=

The Code of Practice was, when measured against the tasks of fighting a Tory government committed to a whole series of anti-union laws, pathetic. As the bosses limbered up to launch their most ruthless offensive for years, Tony Cliff, John Deason and the SWP could only call for a return to basies. After 1979 and the failure of an antiTory movement to emerge from the conference, the shrouds were prepared for Steve Jeffreys and the NRFM.

Both disappeared in the subsequent years. They were followed by the various rank and file papers— Carworker, Redder Tape, Engineers Charter ete, all of whose sales had been steadily dwindling.

THE STEEL STRIKE AND THE RANK AND FILE

This disappearing act was for a time officially unacknowledged. It even went into partial reverse during the 1980 steel strike when the SWP relaunched their bulletin Real Steel News (RSN). Having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, the SWP Bourbons set about pursuing an identical course to that followed by the IS in the 1972 miners’ strike.

With the rank and file mobilised on a huge scale and acting independently of the officials, the opportunity for forging a real rank and file movement was there. To be realised it would have to take up issues like jobs, the transformation of the notoriously undemocratic ISTC, and so on. RSN eschewed these tasks and refused to organise the rank and file during the strike, against the officials. It concentrated solely on mobilising workers around the pay claim. At some unspecified future date the time would be ripe for a rank and file movement, but not while the rank and file were actually in motion on a mass strike.

Socialist Worker reported an RSN meeting as concluding:

“After the strike Real Steel News will have to take up issues like the reform of the ISTC and the fight against redundancy as well as the general political arguments” (our emphasis).

After the strike has been sold out by the unreformed ISTC and after the Tories massacred jobs in the steel industry, and after the militants had once again sunk into apathy, it was too late to take up these issues. Not surprisingly, RSN has not been heard of since.

By 1981 it was obvious to the SWP leadership that their rank and file perspective had collapsed. They were forced to come up with an explanation. Cliff as usual shifted the blame onto his members and the objective situation. The members, it seems, were guilty of doing what he had told them. They had built the rank and file groups as militant trade union bodies, and had themselves acted as militant trade unionists within them.

Lo and behold, they had actually liquidated themselves into these bodies and in so doing, turned them from being a supposed bride into a

44 WORKERS POWER

series of routes out of the party. According to Cliff:

“Instead of recruiting people from rank and file groups into the party, the comrades disappear into the rank and file groups.” (Socialist Review, May/ June 1982)

Earlier a rank and file activist—no doubt put up to it by Cliff—had shamefacedly admitted:

“Our rank and file paper was devoted almost exclusively to what was happening in our own corner of the world and this determined our priorities.” (Socialist Review, November/December 1981)

The SWP’s official historian, Ian Birchall, describes the members of this period as having got lost “in the minutiae of trade union routinism” (The Smallest Mass Party in the World, p24). All of these charges are undoubtedly true, but they beg the question, why did this happen to members of a supposedly revolutionary organisation? The answer is quite straightforward—the SWP leadership ensured that it happened because they designed the rank and file groups as bodies concerned purely with trade union matters.

The second reason cited by Cliff for the collapse of the NRFM perspective is the “downturn” in the class struggle. Since 1974 there has been a gradual collapse of militancy and confidence inside the working class. Combined with high unemployment, this makes the building of a rank and file movement impossible, goes Cliffs argument.

While at one time this would have meant at least keeping alive the notion of rank and file organisation, now it means dropping the idea altogether and, in the case of the health strike, actively opposing the formation of a national shop stewards’ organisation. All that can be done, says Cliff, is to be at the picket lines but “to play it low key—until the upturn comes” (Socialist Review, April 1983). This is classic. In the upturn (197274) the SWP played it “low key” so as not to frighten away militants from the IS or the NRFM. In the downturn they play it “low key” until the upturn! By “low key” they mean not pushing “big politics”, but concentrating on organising pickets and taking collections in order to win over the “ones and twos”.

BACK TO BASICS

In any and every situation, all the SWP can shout is “back to trade unionism”. Sometimes it’s on a big scale (upturn), sometimes it’s on a small scale (the downturn). So now, despite the doubly treacherous role of the officials, and the feracity of the bosses’ offensive, the SWP have wound up their rank and file groups, have retreated into their own geographical branches, where “politics” are to be discussed.

Of course, they continue to intervene in disputes, but here they must only raise small things:

“In locating the ones and twos by collecting money for strikes, we are locating the ones and

twos who are prepared to fight and are prepared to identify with our politics. It is out of such smal] scale activities that a leadership is built for the struggles of the future.” (Cliff, Socialist Review, June 1983)

Cliff and the SWP turned away from the real problems posed by the bosses’ offensive. Like it or not, that offensive raised big, that is national, political issues like privatisation, union rights, the welfare state, war and peace—which class shall rule. To concentrate only on “little things” and hope that the big ones will go away until the SWP and the working class are ready to handle them, is sheer folly. They won't go away.

In the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 the same tailing of the existing leadership of the left bureaucracy was revealed. In their publications the SWP certainly criticised the bureaucrats—including lefts like Scargill—and posed as the defenders of the interest of the rank and file miners. They argued that picketing should have been in their hands. ;

But they had no perspective or programme for transforming the unions and breaking the grip of the bureaucracy. They warned militants not to trust the officials but advanced no programme by which the NUM rank and file could have organised to transform the NUM during the dispute.

But the miners’ strike unleashed the energy of thousands of new militants. In ‘ne Midlands it Jed to the formation of a determined, militant, organised minority. This was the si::ff of which a rank and file movement could have been built. Tony Cliff once stumbled into the potential of the militant minority when he said:

“The key problem in Nottinghamshire is how to mobilise the minority of miners, the 7,000 who voted for a strike. If they had been organised from the beginning and had picketed their own pits then the police operation would have been paralysed.” (SW, 14.4.84)

But Cliff had no answer to his own problem. The effect of raising no call for a rank and file movement was to offer no alternative to Scargill that militants could actually fight for. AN the SWP could say was:

“There is only one way rank and file activists can protect themselves from this danger [Scargill’s weakness]. It is by making sure that as much of the strike as possible is organised from below, by strike committees in each pit, and with co-ordinating committees between pits to organise the picketing.” (SW, 7.4.84)

The SWP’s only answer was for the rank and

file to somehow by-pass the weakness or treachery of the union officials. They offered no way of putting the leaders to the test and, behind their hot anti-bureaucratic talk, they let the left leaders off the hook. In the Health dispute of 1988 we were to see the same thing happen again.

Despite the often tireless activity of SWP members in support of particular strikes, as an organisation the SWP is turning away from the problems that confront the militant minority inside the working class. The SWP’s hostility to questions of leadership and politics, and their faith that an upturn will spontaneously rekindle a fighting spirit are condemning it to sectarian irrelevance.

We believe that, despite the defeats that have been suffered by the working class during the 1980s, the building of a rank and file movement is a necessary task. But it will only be of use to the’ militant minority in the class if it addresses the ideological and organisational crisis that has facilitated recent defeats. It must challenge and defeat the reformist bureaucracy.

To do this, it will require a political strategy, a revolutionary action programme. Revolutionaries do not have programmes for self-education circles alone. A programme is a set of policies, tacties and goals capable of mobilising workers in action. For us, therefore, intervention in the trade unions must be communist intervention. We seek to win, by democratic means, leadership of a genuine rank and file movement.

To do this we need to be absolutely open about, and fight for, our revolutionary politics, and not hide them for fear of frightening people away. This does not mean we present these politics as an ultimatum. On the contrary, we are prepared to take any step, however minimal, that takes the workers forward, alongside reformist workers. However, unless we fight for our own politics at the same time, we cannot expect the working class to break with reformism and march with us along the road of revolutionary struggle.

The SWP’s failure to inject politics inte the NRFM left the militants of the 1970’s to be duped by Jones, Scanlon and the Labour Government. In the 1980's, their “low key approach” left the militants at the mercy of Evans, Duffy, Kinnock and Scargill.

In the 1990s we must seize the opportunity of new struggles to forge a revolutionary communist vanguard in the trade unions. If the SWP comrades want to be part of this then they will need to turn their back decisively on their syndicalist past and present.

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 45

A crisis of leadership

The Socialist Workers Party was a relatively prominent force in the strike committees that were built in the course of the 1988 NHS dispute. Jane Clossick looks at their record in this piece written in the spring of that year.

course of events in the NHS action of 1988.

Yet its actions have generated hostility and confusion amongst healthworkers. In particular, in the run-up to the 26 March health stewards’ conference it made clear that it opposed the conference even taking place.

Socialist Worker, did not carry a single advertisement, let alone an article, calling on stewards and health militants to attend that conference. Despite continuing pressure from the strike committees for a co-ordinated national campaign to win the unions to calling an all-out strike, the SWP sabotaged the best opportunity available to achieve that co-ordination.

This behaviour accounts for some of the hostility many militants feel towards the SWP. As for the confusion the SWP is causing, this is not restricted to the non-aligned. There is clear evidence of confusion, disquiet and even dissent within the ranks of the SWP. Members were thrown by the SWP’s acrobatics over the call for both a one day strike around the budget and an all out strike in the NHS.

The SWP’s position was a case of now you see it, now you don’t. Socialist Worker warned against the “disastrous tactics of selective strikes, overtime bans and workto-rules”, (6.2.88) yet at the same time opposed resolutions explicitly calling for all out action when they came up at the strike committees.

A week later they urged militants to use “action on budget day to build for an all-out strike”. Yet nowhere did they raise or agitate for the call, all out on 14 March, stay out to win.

Their confusion reached its high point on the TUC demonstration on 5 March. Hundreds of SWP members joined angry nurses and other NHS workers in the call for a general strike on 14 March, despite Socialist Worker’s careful refusal, from 3 February on, to raise the call for such a general strike (indeed the paper and SWP members themselves remained confused as to which day they were calling for action, right up to 14 March itself).

And now, after 14 March and budget day, the SWP has written off the idea of an all out strike altogether. They speak of the NHS dispute in the past tense. Having made the budget the be all and end all of their agitation they now conciude:

“No one knows what lies in the months ahead.

Te SWP were in a position to influence the

46 WORKERS POWER

Since the budget has provided such a focus for action, it’s possible that its passage might bring a temporary lull.” (19.3.88)

And this explains their hositility to the stewards’ conference. They do not believe an all-out strike is possible. They will not, therefore, lift a finger to support an initiative aimed at fighting for one.

To confused SWP members, to health workers who feel angry about the SWP’s sabotage of the stewards’ conference, we say these examples are no isolated mistakes. They are not the product of the SWP’s temporary disorientation. They flow from the SWP’s whole political method and perspective for the present period.

Their method is based on the view that revolutionary leadership consists solely of raising demands that have already been spontaneously raised by trade union militants. Generalisation of the struggle means, for the SWP simply getting different sections of workers, fighting on their own demands, striking simultaneously. This method is tailism—tailing the existing struggles, instead of seeking to take these struggles beyond their fimited goals towards a struggle against capitalism itself.

It is also economism. This does not mean being preoccupied with the economic struggle of workers, as the Euro-Stalinists and feminists suggest. We too recognise the vital importance of the workers’ economic struggle as a starting point for anti-capitalist action, The real reason the SWP is guilty of economism is because it does not recognise the need to transform the economic struggle into a conscious political struggle through the use of transitional demands.

Transitional demands are necessary to generalise the class struggle. Sectional battles are not generalised simply by occurring all at the same time. They must also transcend their sectional limits, by taking up the fight for class wide and not just sectional interests.

Transitional demands generalise the struggle in this political sense because they start with the immedi ate needs of the working class—in this case defence of the NHS—but link the fulfillment of those needs to goals which threaten capitalism itseif. Our call for emergency cover only under the control of the strikers is a good example. It starts from the immediate

need to prevent scabbing, but by posing an elementary form of workers’ control it presses the struggle forward towards a challenge to the management's right to manage.

We use the same method with regard to the call for an all-out strike too. We begin from the fact that it is necessary for specific reasons, reasons all too clear to NHS workers. It is an immediate solution to the Tory attack on NHS funding and the way to link the sectional claims of NHS workers with the defence of the NHS as a whole.

Also the all-out strike is part of a programme of action for the current period which not only meets the immediate needs of the struggle, but provides a concrete answer to the question of how we get from a health strike to a socialist revolution. By fighting for defiance of the anti-union laws, building councils of action to tink up different sections of workers in struggle, organising the physical defence of picket lines, fighting for workers’ control over emergency cover, staffing levels, and the allocation of funding, for nationalisation of the drug and supply industry etc we can build a bridge from today's struggie to the struggle for power. Because in such methods and organisations lie the seeds of the future organisa tions that workers can use to transform society.

In other words revolutionaries believe that the economic struggle can only be transformed, can anly become a revolutionary sirvzgle, by a conscious revolutionary leadership, by militants armed with a programme and organised in a party. The SWP on the other hand, believes that, provided they cheer on the economic struggle, it will, in and of itself, become a revolutionary political struggle.

This is why they are guilty of economism. It leads them to view the party not as an organisation that can, through its programme, lead struggles forward towards revolution, but as a mere mechanical device that co-ordinates existing struggles. The recent positions of the SWP illustrate this method of tailing the spontaneous struggle and this economism very clearly.

In the latest Socialist Worker Review, the SWP leader, Tony Cliff, argues:

“If the basic structure of the working class was damaged, if the employers broke through our ranks, there would not be volatility, there would simply be retreat. If workers were fighting with a generalised shop stewards’ organisation there would not be volatility either, workers would simply win.” (Interview with Cliff, SWR 107, p20)

How does the last part of this statement fit in with the SWP in practice vigorously opposing the formation of a “generalised shop stewards’ organisation” in the NHS? To understand this we need to grasp what is wrong with the statement itself.

Cliff argues that if a generalised shop stewards’ movement existed now, as he claims it did before 1974, we would be winning the current spate of industrial struggle.

But the layer of stewards who led the working class offensive of the early 1970s did not disappear by accident. It was demobilised by the Labour govern

ment’s participation schemes. It was demobilised because, despite its strength, it had not broken pofitically from reformism. And after being demobilised, its power in the workplace was severely weakened by the bosses’ offensive after 1979. Not just victimisations, plant closures and unemployment led to the setbacks of militant rank and file unionism.

The shap stewards’ failure to go beyond the limits of the trade union militancy nurtured during the capitalist boom was at the root of the defeats they suffered. in the shape of Thatcherism the ruling class abandoned the politics of consensus and class collaboration that flourished in the post-war boom. They armed themselves with new weapons: the anti-union laws, the militarised police etc, which were able to defeat the steel, car, health, print and mine workers.

These defeats were not inevitable, but the result of workers’ inability to arm themselves similarly with new politics, new methods of struggle and to break from the treacherous leaders who betrayed these struggles. So if the old shop stewards’ organisations could be resurrected by magic tomorrow, they would not “simply win", they would still risk losing again unless they developed revolutionary political answers to the bosses’ offensive, unless they were broken from reformism. Cliff's tailism and economism blinds him to this.

This blindness is sharply revealed in the SWP’s notion of the “vacuum” of leadership. Cliff refers to it in his interview. In a misnamed article called “Which way to victory?” Chris Harman explains what it means:

“There can be a vacuum of leadership, in which the actions of a few activists can influence how very many workers fignt . . . But the union leaders are soon back in the fray, trying to reassert their control.” (Socialist Worker 13.2.88)

This is wrong and dangerous and it has bad practical results. {t reveals the syndicalist approach of the SWP to the bureaucracy. it ignores the real crisis of leadership inside the working class, a crisis that prevails even where the bureaucracy temporarily lose control of events.

This crisis is reflected in the failure of many militants to spontaneously go beyond trade union militancy. Take the example of 3 February. It is true that it was socialists who influenced the course of events. But there was never a vacuum. There was a struggle. The first element of the struggle was aimed at preventing the bureaucracy from sabotaging the action and then from being able to regain their control. The second element of the struggle was the attempt to break the militants who took action from the reformist ideas that would allow the bureaucracy to regain control. That struggle is stitl continuing.

Recognising this crisis of leadership—workers willing to fight, a strong reformist bureaucracy, a weak revolutionary altemative—does not mean that we favour a simple replacement of the trade union or Labour tops as do Militant or the CP. It means that we have to develop a practical series of demands and forms of action that pit workers, in struggle, against their leaders and enable them to establish a

THE POLITICS OF THE SWP 47

new fighting leadership in thoroughly transformed unions.

The idea of a “vacuum of leadership” is in reality a means of running away from a struggle against the existing leadership. It implies that when they go away we simply jump in and fill the vacuum. Thus instead of offering a political strategy for the health workers now the SWP reduces its strategy to simply preparing for the day when it can fill the vacuum. Harman explains:

“We need to put more emphasis on the sales of Socialist Worker and ensure we have a routine intervention in every struggle. Only then will we be able to seize opportunities which are suddenly thrown up as militancy escapes, temporarily, from the control of the new realist union officials.”

In the immediate aftermath of 3 February Harman says nothing on how to build for an all-out strike. The vacuum has been filled by the bureaucrats and we'll ali have to wait until the bureaucracy go on holiday or fall asleep or something so we can enjoy a few weeks’ militancy, which we can tail in the hope of it spontaneously becoming generalised.

Not surprisingly, since the budget the SWP have begun to argue that the only answer for militants is

This pamphiet Is published by Workers Power BCM 7750, London WC1N 3XX

Printed by Clearprint (Peckham) 071 703 4229 Cover printed by Oval Printshop (TU)

48 WORKERS POWER

to join the SWP. Now we don't object to parties fighting for recruits. We will aim to win many ourselves. But an individual joining a party is not a strategy for securing the victory of a still continuing vital dispute. The key thing is what a party fights for. That is how it should be judged.

instead of arguing for what is necessary the SWP constantly tailors its politics to what it thinks is possible. This solves the mystery of the SWP in one breath bemoaning the absence of a collective stewards’ organisations and in the next breath condemning those who are trying to build one.

Because stewards’ organisation is weak in the NHS, because no “collective, generalised” layer exists spontaneously, it becomes for the SWP “irrelevant”, “sectarian”, “too early” to attempt to organise a national stewards’ conference in the weeks after NUPE and COHSE’s sabotage of the 14-15 March strikes.

Likewise the fight for an all out strike, though necessary cannot be practically fought for because the majority of workers at present don’t think it is possible.

Once again, as past masters of the art of the possible, the SWP lag behind the best layers of the working class.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has a fair claim to be the largest far left organisation in Britain. It has fraternal organisations in another dozen countries. {ts publications are read and respected by thousands beyond its ranks.

But how exactly should we define its politics?

Its founding members originated in a split from Trotsky’s Fourth International yet today the SWP claims allegiance to Trotskyism and Leninism.

This pamphlet shows that far from standing in this tradition the key tenets of the SWP’s politics represent a fundamental break with Trotskyism: on party building, on the analysis of the USSR and Eastern Europe, on revolutionary leadership in the trade unions.

This Trotskyist critique proves how it is possible to enrich and deepen Trotskyism while remaining true to the bed-rock theories and ideas of the founder of the Fourth International.

Workers Power is the British section of the League for a Revolutionary Communist international. The LRCI also includes:

ArbeiterInnenstandpunkt (Austria)

Gruppe Arbeitermacht (BRD/DDR)

Irish Workers Group

Poder Obrero (Peru)

Pouvoir Ouvrier (France)

Poder Obrero-OCiR (Bolivia) is in the process of discussions with the LRC! with the aim of becoming an affiliated section

The Revolutionary Trotskyist Tendency (USA) has fraternal relations with the LRCI

ISBN 0 9508133 5 4