Monday 18 March 2024

The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, 3. The Soviets and The Constituent Assembly - Part 3 of 15

Trotsky quotes Lenin on the experience of 1917, to show just to what extent this revolutionary/transitional approach differs from that of the opportunists, and their support for bourgeois-democracy.

““Even a few weeks before the victory of the soviet republic, even after this victory, the participation in a parliament of bourgeois democracy, far from injuring the revolutionary proletariat, helps it to prove to the backward masses that these parliaments deserve to be dissolved, facilitates the success of their dissolution, brings nearer the moment when it could be said that bourgeois parliamentarism had ‘had its day politically’.” (Lenin, Works, Vol.XVII, 1920; The Infantile Sickness of Communism, p.149.)” (p 188)

Trotsky describes the way Lenin ordered a contingent of Lettish infantry, composed of agricultural workers, to disband the Constituent Assembly, rather than rely on the Petrograd Garrison, comprised largely of peasants. The latter, Lenin feared, may have baulked at the task, and Trotsky explains why. The peasants had no history or reason to place confidence in an urban leadership, even one that is proletarian. The proletariat and peasantry are two different classes, with different class interests, and the same is true of the petty-bourgeoisie.

The strength of the proletariat, even in still largely agricultural economies, like Russia, in 1917, comes from its role in production, its concentration in the towns and cities, and mostly homogeneous class interest. Even where it does not form a numerical majority, its this which enables it to take a leading role. By contrast, the bourgeoisie is tiny. Its strength resides in its control of capital and the state. The peasantry, like the petty-bourgeoisie, has neither of those things, and its strength derives from its numerical size, which is most influential in terms of formal democracy.

Even today, in a developed country like Britain, where the petty-bourgeoisie comprises around 15 million voters, they have no economic power, nor industrial strength, nor resort to the state – indeed, even when they get a reactionary Tory government elected, its policies such as Brexit are resisted by that state, and where it challenges the interests of the ruling class more significantly, the ruling class can bring down the government, as it did with Truss's government in Autumn 2022.

The electoral power of that petty-bourgeoisie, was seen in its ability to get a reactionary, petty-bourgeois government elected, and the Brexit vote, and, indeed, its ability to seize control of the Tory Party, as it did with the Republican Party in the US, but the limits of that, and of bourgeois-democracy, are also illustrated by it. Fetishising bourgeois-democracy is, then, to limit the strength of the proletariat, and to play into the hands of its class enemies, particularly the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, which provides the shock troops of fascism.

“The Social Revolutionaries were the party with the greatest numbers in the Russian Revolution. In the first period, everyone who was not either a conscious bourgeois or a conscious worker voted for them. Even in the Constituent Assembly, that is, after the October Revolution, the Social Revolutionaries formed the majority. They therefore considered themselves a great national party. They turned out to be a great national zero.

We do not want to equate the Russian Social Revolutionaries with the German National Socialists. But there are, undoubtedly, similarities between them that are very important In clarifying the question under discussion. The Social Revolutionaries were a party of hazy popular hopes. The National Socialists are a party of national despair. The petty bourgeoisie has always shown the greatest capacity to pass from hope to despair, dragging a part of the proletariat along with it. The great bulk of the National Socialists is, as was the case with the Social Revolutionaries, human dust.”


It was the failure of the Stalinists to recognise that, in Germany, and Spain, in the 1930's, which led them to underestimate the strength of the proletariat, and overestimate the strength of the fascists, and, as in China in 1925-7, led them into a timid, opportunist and tailist strategy, based on an alliance with its untrustworthy class enemies. In all those cases, it led not only to the defeat of the workers, but also to the victory of reaction and counter-revolution.

Sunday 17 March 2024

Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 7 of 7

Modern industry creates the conditions in which, not only is the proletariat created, but in which it is brought together in large concentrations, as Lenin pointed out in his polemics against the Narodniks, not necessarily just in factories, but in the towns and cities.

“Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favour of wages. In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.” (p 159)

Some time ago, in response to one of my posts, where I had described this function of capital as progressive, a US reader objected, citing the fact that US employers had sought to prevent the unionisation of workers and so on. But, as I responded, had there been no industrial capital, nor would there have been a modern proletariat, and no unions! And, in fact, as Marx describes, here, in response to Proudhon, the bosses never are able to prevent the combination of workers, particularly in times of economic expansion.

“This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.” (p 160)

Again, this emphasises the difference between the class struggle, as a political struggle, as against the purely sectional, distributional struggle of unions for higher wages. In fact, as Marx and Lenin set out, this latter struggle, whilst inevitable, is itself an acceptance of bourgeois ideology, and the trades unions, like the social-democratic parties that rest upon them, are bourgeois institutions. Workers must break from the limitations of these bourgeois ideas and institutions, if they are to become a class for themselves, and bring about their own liberation.

Marx compares the process with that of the bourgeois revolution, and its liberation from feudalism.

“In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish: that in which it constituted itself as a class under the regime of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and that in which, already constituted as a class, it overthrew feudalism and monarchy to make society into a bourgeois society. The first of these phases was the longer and necessitated the greater efforts. This too began by partial combinations against the feudal lords.” (p 160)

The organisation of workers into trades unions and social-democratic parties, represents this same phase of development, into a class in itself, but it has yet to become a class for itself. The fact that these bourgeois workers' organisations exert such a dead weight upon it is one reason for that, but so too is the crisis of political leadership, as those that call themselves Marxists so frequently pass off these actions of bargaining within the system, by the unions and social-democrats as actual class struggle.

“An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.” (p 160)

Note that Marx does not speak, here, of such transformation coming from above, by the state, but by the workers emancipating themselves, a point he also emphasises in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. It follows on from his view set out, in Capital III, Chapter 27, of the socialised capital representing the transitional form of property.  In other words, the social revolution, creating these new material foundations and social relations of the new society has already taken place.  As Lenin pointed out to Mikhailovsky and others, Marx's theory of historical materialism does not make predictions of the future, but only describes what has already occurred, and its inevitable completion.


Saturday 16 March 2024

The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, 3. The Soviets and The Constituent Assembly - Part 2 of 15

In every case, this Bonapartist/military regime is highly inefficient, draining surplus value/product that should be used for capital accumulation. The bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie are continually thrown against it.

“Before these collisions develop to the point of becoming an open revolutionary struggle, they will pass, from all the available facts, through a “constitutional” stage. The conflicts between the bourgeoisie and its own military cliques will inevitably draw in the upper layer of the petty-bourgeois masses, through the medium of a “third party” or by other means. From the standpoint of economics and of culture, the former are extraordinarily feeble. Their political strength lies in their numbers. Therefore, the slogans of formal democracy win over, or are capable of winning over, not only the petty-bourgeois masses but also the broad working masses, precisely because they reveal to them the possibility, which is essentially illusory, of opposing their will to that of the generals, the country squires and the capitalists. The proletarian vanguard educates the masses by using this experience, and leads them forward.” (p 187)

This illustrates the illusion of bourgeois-democracy, and why the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie is benefited by it, as against the workers, particularly in these still essentially agrarian economies. In them, the peasantry constitutes the largest mass, and the petty-bourgeoisie of small producers is often larger than the industrial working-class. The working-class grows rapidly, and sees the illusion of its numbers, in the same light as that of these middle-classes. But, as Trotsky points out, elsewhere, that is an illusion of the comparative social power of different strata.

The bourgeoisie is tiny, but controls the state, and its own interests coincide with the peasants and petty-bourgeoisie, as against the workers. The middle classes are large in size, which is significant in terms of votes, but are economically and socially feeble. Even, today, for example, the petty-bourgeoisie in Britain comprises about 15 million small business people, self-employed etc., or a third of the electorate, which is the electoral and membership base of the Tory Party, and Brexit. But, they are economically and socially impotent.

“the main strength of the fascists is their strength in numbers. Yes, they have received many votes. But in the social struggle, votes are not decisive. The main army of fascism still consists of the petty bourgeoisie and the new middle class: the small artisans and shopkeepers of the cities, the petty officials, the employees, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. On the scales of election statistics, a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Communist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives, and their mothers-in-law. The great bulk of the fascists consists of human dust.”


The experience of Russia, Trotsky says, shows that, during this process, the proletariat, organised in soviets, can draw behind it large sections of the peasantry. So, note, here, that nothing Trotsky says, involves support for bourgeois-democracy, which is illusory, and detrimental to workers interests, as against being beneficial to the interests of its class enemies, and that the means of fighting for it, in so far as it has to, is that of the proletarian revolution, of soviets and workers self-government, based on proletarian, not bourgeois democracy. The soviets are not posited as an alternative to that formal democracy, but developed as part of the struggle for it, and so, from the start, offer the prospect of simply by-passing it, or quickly supplanting it.

“The experience of Russia shows that during the progress of the revolution, the proletariat organized in soviets can, by a correct policy, directed towards the conquest of power, draw behind it the peasantry, fling it against the front of formal democracy embodied in the Constituent Assembly, and switch it on the rails of soviet democracy. In any case, these results were not attained by simply opposing the soviets to the Constituent Assembly, but by drawing the masses towards the soviets while maintaining the slogans of formal democracy up to the very moment of the conquest of power and even after it.” (p 187-8)


Northern Soul Classics - How Do You Like It - The Sheppards

 

Friday 15 March 2024

Friday Night Disco - Be My Lady - The Astors

 



More Weasel Words From AWL Zionists

As Palestinians face a continuing genocide in Gaza, and oppression in the West Bank and elsewhere, and their supporters, in Britain, face attacks by the British state, the Zionists of the AWL, issue weasel words, and join in the attack.

The weasel words come in the form of the most flaccid criticism of the Tories attempts to ban protests. But, the AWL basically accepts and endorses many of the lies put out by the Tories and Zionists, used to support the proposals for such bans. For example, AWL member Jim Denham, writes, in relation to the chant “From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free”,

“Some may first think it’s a bland “freedom everywhere” call. But by now most protesters must know that many Jews see it as threatening; as meaning Arab or Islamic rule in all of 1918-48 Palestine, “from the river to the sea”, and the wiping-out of Israel. So, using that slogan must either mean you want to make the threat, or that you simply don’t care.”

Well, that is odd, then, isn't it, and seems to confirm the Tories claims about many Jews in London being legitimately afraid, and their statements about “No Go Areas”. Its odd, because, there have been large numbers of Jews on all those demonstrations, who most certainly did not appear to be at all afraid, and who marched, as distinct and identified Jewish groups. Owen Jones has covered it in some of his videos. Yet, no mention of it, from the Zionist Jim Denham, no thought from him that, maybe, if there are Jews in London who feel afraid of these marches, those fears are not legitimate, and have simply been stoked up by Tories, and Zionists, just as with the ridiculous fears that some had that a Corbyn Labour government was going to be introducing gas chambers! Jim Denham, in simply talking about those fears, is part of the process of stoking them.

Meanwhile, Denham asserts his own interpretation of what that chant means, as calling for the violent destruction of Israel. No doubt some of those responsible for it, have that intent, and it is an intent that no Marxist could support. Yet, oddly, the same slogan “From The River To The Sea”, forms part of the programme of the Zionist Likud Party, which dominates the current government of Netanyahu. It sets out clearly the intention of Zionism to remove Palestinians from historic Palestine (and beyond) so as to establish a racist, confessional state, in which Jews have exclusive rights, and non-Jews are either excluded, or reduced to second-class citizens. Netanyahu has even presented maps in speeches to the UN, in which such a state is presented, and in which Palestine does not exist. What is more, as against the inability of the Palestinians or their supporters to eradicate the state of Israel from existence, the Zionists do have the power, backed by western imperialism, of eradicating the Palestinians, and though Denham seems to have missed it, that is precisely what the Zionists have been doing for the last six months!

But, Denham does not seem to care that the slogan "From the river to the sea", is the mantra of the Zionism he supports, and that, as we speak, it is being implemented by the Zionist state, via a genocide against the Palestinian people.

Denham gives us more weasel words and slipperiness, linked to his previous social-patriotic clap-trap, about capitalist states' right of self-defence. He says,

“The gist is: smash Israel. Not have the workers within it “smash” capitalist rule within it, but simply wipe out the country itself (something that socialists have never in the whole of history sought to do to any other country).”

That, of course, is precisely what the AWL supported when they backed NATO's bombing of Libya, and before that, they had carried articles, basically supporting the idea of backing “democratic imperialism” in destroying Nazism in Germany, in WWII. Today, they back NATO imperialism in backing Ukrainian imperialism in its war against Russian imperialism. But, the weasel words, here, are not just contained in what is said, but what is not said. True, socialists have never interpreted “revolutionary defeatism” to mean that we actively seek the defeat of our own state, by some other state in war. But, unlike the AWL, what we do interpret it to mean is that we do not recognise any right of self-defence for any capitalist state, in war. We start from the principle that our main enemy is at home. We start from the principle that we seek only to defend the working-class, in opposition to our own ruling class, including in Israel, and that to do that its necessary to solidarise with workers elsewhere, not with that ruling class. The AWL has abandoned that basic Marxist principle to pursue its Zionism and pro-imperialism.

Denham says,

“The slogan “Free Palestine” was brought into currency on demonstrations in 2002 precisely because it was ambiguous. It could mean freeing Palestinian territories from Israeli occupation and founding an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel (i.e., two states for two peoples). But its promoters meant “freeing” the whole of 1918-1948 Palestine from any “Zionist” (i.e., Jewish) presence whatsoever.”

He seems to have no concern for actual people as human beings, but only for bits of land, in which people live, typical of a nationalist. As I pointed out forty years ago, when I was a member of the WSL, which was a predecessor organisation of the AWL, before it degenerated, the whole two-states idea was a fantasy, and did not, for one thing deal with the national minorities that would be trapped inside these two sectarian hell-holes. Everything I said would happen, has happened. The reality is that there have been two states – a Palestinian state, divided between Gaza and the West Bank, and the Zionist state in Israel. Did it resolve the issue, no, it made it worse. The Zionist state in Israel, would never allow the Palestinian state to function as a state, and it has been backed by the US, in that endeavour.

The Palestinians were left with one leadership that sought to suck up to western imperialism and the Arab bourgeoisie, and was led to police its own population, and an alternative leadership – Hamas – that looked to other reactionary, “anti-imperialist forces”. Neither offered the Palestinian masses any progressive solution to their plight, just as, inside Israel, the Zionist state apparatus, locked the workers into a Bonapartist, militarised state, doomed to perpetual conflict with a large portion of its own population, and its neighbours, unless it could inflict a “final solution” upon them.

Denham seems to have no concern in his above formulation for the fact that, not only is the two-state solution a reactionary fantasy, but that, even were such a fantasy to be realised, in some kind of Motherhood and Apple Pie scenario, a quarter of Israel's own population, around 2 million people, are Israeli-Arabs, who are also, currently, neither equal, nor entirely free citizens. These are not Palestinians in the West Bank, and other occupied territories, but in Israel itself. Does Denham not think that these Palestinians, should also be free? Does he not think they should have equal rights to Israeli Jews, indeed, the same rights that the Zionist state offers to all Jews, wherever they live in the world, but does not offer to Palestinians?

Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 6 of 7

The Ricardians, out of whom emerged the social-democrats, and the Utopian socialists, both opposed combinations of workers, but for different reasons.

“The economists want the workers to remain in society as it is constituted and as it has been signed and sealed by them in their manuals.

The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight.” (p 158)

Yet, the workers continued to form more and bigger unions, and the degree of that development was also an index of the degree of capital development in each country. It became so, because, for as long as workers had not yet developed to a stage of breaking with bourgeois ideology, of positing themselves as a class for themselves, in opposition to the bourgeoisie, they were doomed to continue to stay within the confines of bourgeois production and social relations, simply engaging in periodic distributional struggles over the price of their labour-power. That reality forced them to create such unions the better to engage in those negotiations. It was a dead-end, as Marx sets out in Value, Price and Profit.

“They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society...

Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”

But, it was also an inevitable part of the process of the workers forming themselves as a class for themselves, so as not to engage in a purely economic, distributional struggle, but a political struggle, for the creation of a new type of society. As Lenin put it, strikes, other than a political General Strike, are not class struggles, but only sectional struggles, but they are also at the same time, a school for real class struggle.

“Strikes, therefore, teach the workers to unite; they show them that they can struggle against the capitalists only when they are united; strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary, police government. This is the reason that socialists call strikes “a school of war,” a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labour, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital.

“A school of war” is, however, not war itself. When strikes are widespread among the workers, some of the workers (including some socialists) begin to believe that the working class can confine itself to strikes, strike funds, or strike associations alone; that by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its conditions or even its emancipation. When they see what power there is in a united working class and even in small strikes, some think that the working class has only to organise a general strike throughout the whole country for the workers to get everything they want from the capitalists and the government. This idea was also expressed by the workers of other countries when the working-class movement was in its early stages and the workers were still very inexperienced. It is a mistaken idea. Strikes are one of the ways in which the working class struggles for its emancipation, but they are not the only way; and if the workers do not turn their attention to other means of conducting the struggle, they will slow down the growth and the successes of the working class.”