Dialectics at Work

Trotsky said that the essence of the dialectic was the understanding that the truth is always concrete. By that what he meant was that for Marxists there can be no room for formalistic thinking when it came to analysing social realities, and how they should react to them. There ar no absolutes. In the last few days I have been reading some of the online material of a couple of left groups, and there are a couple of instances where this approach applies clearly, but where the left still appears stuck in a formalistic method. I am sure there are many more, but its these two in particular I have been reading, and in one case responding to.

Permanent Revolution

The first is a discussion on the permanent Revolution website. The discussion began by an article about Venezuela, and the PSUV, and how Marxists should respond to it. See: PSUV. But, the debate has widened somewhat to encompass the question - "What constitutes a Workers Party?", and "How Should Marxists Relate to Existing Mass Parties?" I have dealt with this question myself before in my blog - Marxists and the Workers Party.

Marx and Definitions

The point is that a Workers Party like a Workers State or any other kind of social formation cannot be viewed as some kind of absolute, cannot be viewed in the formalistic terms of syllogistic logic, where A always equals A, a Workers State is always a Workers State, a Workers party always a Workers Party and so on, provided the definition of what Workers State or Workers Party is set down clearly, and so every example can be compared to see if it matches. It cannot be like that for the simple reason that there cannot be some absolute definition set down in stone of what a Workers State is, or what a Workers Party is. That definition must for a Marxist be determined itself with reference not to absolutes, but with reference to reality.

Look in Marx for a fixed definition of what is central to his theory - class. You will not find it. Look for a similar definition of the other aspect of his theory, which is fundamental - productive relations. Again you will not find it. In Capital III Marx did begin to give an elaborated theory of class, but stopped work on it, because he found himself going round in circles. All we are left with in Capital is a small fragment. As one theorist has put it, Marx found himself becoming a "box person", whereby he found himself trying to fit phenomena such as class, or more precisely individuals in this case into boxes i.e. this individual has this set of characteristics, and therefore goes in this box rather than that box. That is the method of twentieth century analytical science. But in fact, such an approach would be fundamentally alien to Marx and Engels, and indeed many other theorists of the 19th century. The reason it is fundamentally alien can be seen by looking at how Marx and Engels actually did proceed.

Does the fact that Marx never set down in black and white what he meant by class, or by productive relations mean that in fact he did not have a definition of those things, that in fact, therefore, he did not really have a theory based on such a definition? Of course not. Marx does define what he means by class, but what he means by class is not at all formalistic, is not a fixed definition, so he could not define class in terms of class is A, B, C, D etc. characteristics, precisely because at some other time and place, class would not be those components, but might be some of them but not others, might include other components and so on. Look at Marx's clearest use of the concept of class in his works such as the Civil War in France, or the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. There you will see that Marx does not begin by giving a list like definition of class before proceeding to his analysis, but proceeds by an analysis of reality, and defines the various classes in terms of their actual reality and interrelationships.

Engels to Bloch

Engels in his letter to Bloch outlines why he and Marx could not possibly have a definition of class, which sought to locate individuals in particular classes according to fixed formula. He writes,

"In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting force, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it."

See: Engels letter to Bloch

But, the same is true for productive relations. Marx and Engels refer t productive relations many times in their work, but nowhere are they actually defied, nor could they be. Throughout Capital Marx defines Productive Relations not in some fixed, formalistic way, but in their concrete reality, in their process of development as they arise in society.

For the same reason it is not possible to define a Workers State or a Workers Party in such absolute and formalistic terms. To say this cannot be a Workers Party because although the majority of its members are workers its leadership is bourgeois is not a Marxist, dialectical method of analysis. In the same way saying this MUST be a Workers Party, because it is made up of workers, or because it has a Marxist programme etc. is not Marxist either. There can be no such absolute definitions. The only basis of definition can be to take the phenomenon in its concrete reality including all other conditions of its existence, and the direction of the process of development. The German Democrats in terms of its Programme and leadership were when Marx and Engels joined them, but in its concrete reality was it a Workers Party? Yes, it was, precisely because given the historical development and the material conditions there was nothing more advanced that could at the time have existed, nothing that could more closely have approximated the Workers Party in its state of maturity. It would have been sectarian folly then for Marx and Engels to have simply looked at this party in the formal terms of its Programme and leadership, declared it bourgeois, and set off on some adventure to create yet another tiny and irrelevant sect. That is why they didn't do it.

At the same time with a working class demonstrating a clearer class consciousness, clamouring for a Party that more closely met its needs, and coincided with its ideas it would have been equally folly to have argued against establishing the Labour Party - as for example the Fabians did - on the basis that the majority of workers still gave their support to the Liberals!

Dialectics and the Workers Party Today

But, if we apply that dialectical method to today what conclusion do we reach. Can we identify any material conditions which justify the belief that a Workers Party could exist in Britain that was a Workers Party in the way that the LP is i.e. that it is made up of largely ordinary working class people, attracts the support of ordinary working class people, is organically linked to the Labour Movement through the Trade Unions and Co-operative Movement, and yet which had a programme that more adequately reflected the needs of the working class? If anyone can I would love to see it. The fact is that no such material conditions currently exist. The LP is what it is, and is where it is, not for some inexplicable reason, but for wholly identifiable reasons. All of those sects from the Communist Party, through the WRP, to the SWP, to the Socialist Alliance, through to the latest farce of the Left List in the London Elections, have failed to win any kind of substantial working class backing, in votes or in membership for perfectly understandable reasons. The reason was given by Engels, don't try to ram down the throats of workers ideas they are not yet ready to accept. And the fact is that workers CANNOT accept the ideas of such organisations in the mass for the simple reason that the workers consciousness has not yet reached the necessary level to be able to accept those ideas. They remain dominated by bourgeois ideas, at best bourgeois ideas as refracted through the lens of Social Democracy, at worst in their unrefracted clarity through the Tory Party, the Lib Dems, or Blairism. In order for workers consciousness to change the workers material condition has to change, and that in itself is a dialectical process.

Statism

For most of the 20th century the workers experience of "socialism" was refracted through the lens of statism. Having experienced the crisis of Capitalism in WWI, in the depression of the 1930's, in the rise of Fascism, of the catastrophe of WWII it is not surprising that workers could reach the conclusion that there must be something better than that. Having seen the success of the Russian Revolution, seen the capacity for Stalinism to develop a medieval economy at a rapid pace at precisely the time when capitalism was collapsing during the Depression, it is not surprising that at least a large section of workers would see in that example a way forward, especially if they either were unaware of, or else set aside from their thoughts the brutal aspects of Stalinism. Having seen, the fact that State provision of certain services such as Education could provide them with some improvement in their lot, and given the fact that all the Socialist and Communist Parties had such state provision as the core of their Programmes, it is not surprising that workers should see such statism as the means of resolving their problems. So we have a combination of material and ideological factors interrelating here in a dialectical fashion to shape workers consciousness. But, in fact as Marx outlined in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, that Programme of statism whether in its Leninist form or in its Social democratic form could in reality never lead workers towards a socialist class consciousness, precisely because it leads workers to rely not on their own self-activity, but to rely on the State whether that be in the former instance a Workers State under the control of an elitist vanguard (at best), or a bourgeois state theoretically at the disposal of a Workers Government.

It is no wonder that this whole edifice collapsed once as Marx had warned such a programme was shown to have nothing to with socialism. And it collapsed not just in its Leninist, but in its Social Democratic forms. Workers consciousness can only be raised and moved towards a socialist consciousness if the material conditions change in a direction which provides the basis for that. That means if the means of production begin to come under the ownership and control not of some State, but of the workers themselves. Only on that basis can workers arrive at the conclusion, not only CAN they manage without bosses, but that they MUST manage without bosses. The workers might fail, this or that co-operative might collapse because it is not competitive etc. But workers can understand that, learn the lessons and move on. They can learn that they need more Capital, they need to be better trained or educated, that they need a greater degree of co-operation with other co-operatives, that they need a political struggle to prevent the bourgeois state and the bourgeoisie from frustrating their efforts. But all of these are lessons that workers can learn that RAISE their level of class-consciousness. And in doing so they facilitate the development of socialist ideas within the class, facilitate their spread and their formulation within the Programme of the Workers Party. None of that is true of those statist approaches, which seek to divert workers down the path of seeking solutions by the good grace of some State.

That is not to say that in order to move forward to socialism workers will not need to establish a Workers State, or that within that process they will need to go beyond individually owned co-operatives, into an economy based on State owned property, this is not a programme of Anarchism or Proudhonism, but it is to suggest as Marx and Engels did, that that process can only arise from the bottom up, that the Workers State rests upon a Civil Society in which Workers Property and Workers Control dominates, and not vice versa. Read, Engels for instance ho insists that he and Marx saw Co-operatives as fulfilling a central role for a long time in the process of transformation between capitalism and socialism, and who says that their view of State ownership amounted to nothing more than that the State held the title deeds to the property, whilst the actual day to day management rested with the workers themselves in each enterprise.

Workers have experienced this statism, and reject it. Even in the form most people have some kind of affinity to - the NHS - a recent poll showed that 70% of people if they could afford would use private health care. Experience of the inefficient, bureaucratic, nature of state provision necessarily leads workers to reject it as a solution to their problems, whereas once - precisely because all they could compare against was private capitalist provision - they saw it as a solution. Marxists should never have been advocating that statist solution to workers problems, but as Draper has correctly argued the mass Social Democratic parties of the late 19th and early centuries owed most of their Programme not to Marx, but to Lassalle and to Fabianism. Lenin cast off the reformist elements of the Second International, but his ideology retained all of that Lassallean statism. It is no use Marxists today continuing to bang hat drum. It is time to get back to the ideas of Marx, and Engels, and indeed others such as Morris that insists on solutions coming from the direct, self-activity of the class, and which sets as its basis the transformation of the workers material conditions as the fundamental requirement for the transformation of consciousness.

See also: Why Marxists Do Not Call for Nationalisation

Workers cannot align themselves with the ideas that the left propose, because the reality is that such ideas are outside the realm of what appears real to them. You cannot ask workers to support a Programme based on statism when they have seen such statism in Britain, and in the USSR and reject it – and quite rightly too. You cannot ask workers to support the idea that all would be well if only the workers in these industries had Workers Control, because the obvious question a worker will ask is, “Why should an employer allow me to exercise control over his business?” Given that only a tiny minority of workers even go to their union Branch meetings, why would these same workers want to put themselves out to go to yet another meeting to exercise such control? That only becomes an obvious and necessary function for the workers to carry out, and something they can understand IF they themselves are the owners of the business. Even if the business is owned by a “Workers State” there is no necessary connection between that ownership, and the individual workers relationship to it. That is one reason why in Russia, workers were prepared to allow in the main the State itself to organise the control, and so led to the formation of a bureaucratic stratum. A necessary alienation between the workers and those means of production is set up from the beginning.

London and the Left List

So time and again the left decide that the Labour Party – or other mass Workers parties elsewhere – is dead, and if only they build the New Workers Party “they will come”. Unfortunately, life is not a movie, and the illusions remain just a dream. Look at the fiasco of the London Elections. The SWP sets up yet another front organisation to contest the elections. Even the SWP’s most virulent opponents, the AWL, having declared the LP a stinking corpse, decides to jump on its bandwagon – See: Vote labour, and The Labour Party is Dead - and calls for a vote for the reactionaries of Hezbollah/SWP. The Left got less than 1% of the vote, just a quarter of the vote that went to the BNP!!! The result was not only that Boris Johnson was elected, which is a catastrophe for all London’s workers, but that it strengthened the Right in the LP, who can now turn round, and demonstrate just how irrelevant the left is, and use that as a weapon against the left in the Workers Party.

Consequence of a Labour Defeat

It is quite possible given the current state of the Parties that Brown will lose the next General Election. It is not certain, they were written off a couple of weeks ago for the Glasgow East by-election, but now look certain to win it, and much will depend upon what happens to the economy, and what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iran. See: Will Mr Brown Be Sent Off to the Coast? But, the likely consequence of such a defeat will not be that Workers will swarm to some new Left Party. The likely consequence is that it will spell the end of Brown/Blairism, will lead the TU bureaucrats to reassert some control, and thereby to establish some kind of semi-Stalinist, Left reformist Party with a consequent return of many Old Labour supporters, and probably a significant number of new ones who simply respond to the lifting of the dead-weight of Blairism. That will not be a particularly progressive development. It would be far better were Marxists now to be organising themselves within the Labour Party ready to shape such developments.

The CPGB and the USSR

The second discussion I was reading was one in the Weekly Worker from some time ago about the USSR. The CPGB says in its Draft Programme,

Nationalisation

“From the point of view of world revolution, programmes for wholesale nationalisation are today objectively reactionary. The historic task of the working class is to fully socialise the giant transnational corporations not break them up into inefficient national units. Our starting point is the most advanced achievements of capitalism. Globalised production needs global social control.
Communists oppose the illusion that nationalisation equates in some way with socialism. There is nothing inherently progressive or socialistic about nationalised industries.”

Point 3.4

Other than the fact that the first part of this is a bit maximalist and ultimatist, this is largely correct for the reasons I have given above in my blog “Why Marxists Do Not Argue for nationalisation”. But, for the reasons outlined there, the next part of the Weekly Workers Programme is wrong, when it says,

“Under definite circumstances, however, nationalisation serves the interests of the workers. Faced with plans for closure or mass sackings, communists demand that the state - the executive committee of the bourgeoisie - not the workers bear the consequences for failure.”

No it does not!!! The capitalists state if it nationalises something does not do it for the benefit of the workers, but for the benefit of the capitalist class it serves. To suggest otherwise is extremely foolish and misleads the working class. To suggest that the Capitalist state has done this to meet the interest of workers is to suggest one of two things either that in the same way that the Lassalleans and Katheder Socialists argued the State is some kind of empty vessel devoid of class content, which can just as easily act in workers interests as bosses interests, or it is to suggest that workers can actually exercise control over that state. But, Trotsky showed what was wrong with this last concept. Criticising the Comintern and other centrists who argued that it was possible to control the army of the capitalist state he wrote,

"Where and when has an oppressed proletariat “controlled” the foreign policy of the bourgeoisie and the activities of its arm? How can it achieve this when the entire power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie? In order to lead the army, it is necessary to overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize power. There is no other road. But the new policy of the Communist International implies the renunciation of this only road.

When a working class party proclaims that in the event of war it is prepared to “control” (i.e., to support) its national militarism and not to overthrow it, it transforms itself by this very thing into the domestic beast of capital. There is not the slightest ground for fearing such a party: it is not a revolutionary tiger but a trained donkey. It may be kept in starvation, flogged, spat upon it – it will nevertheless.”

Marxists and Adequate Slogans of Struggle

But, it is just as ludicrous to suggest that workers can control the actions of the bouregois state in terms of it nationalising means of production, as is the idea that workers can control the armed forces of that state. In a superficial sense the fact that the State interferes to “save” workers jobs appears beneficial, but the state only does that in order to save Capital, not to save the workers jobs. The workers do not make the bourgeois state pay for the crisis, the bouregois state uses its greater power than the power of the private capitalit the better to throw the cost of that crisis on to the workers. Just look at the nationalisation of Norther Rock. The capitalists were protected, the first action of the newly nationalised company was to announce the redundancy of thousands of workers!!!! Of course, just as marxists do not turn round to workers engaging in a strike for higher pay, and procalim, “Your struggle is futile, you should be struggling for the aboliiton of the wages system” so Marxists would not oppose, or stand aside from a struggle by workers for such nationalisation, nor would they argue for private ownership as against a decision of the capitalist state to nationalise. But, the task of Marxists IS at the same time as supporting the workers struggle to raise with them demands which give them an adequate slogan of struggle as Marx put it in his letter to Ruge. In a pay strike, Marxists SHOULD be also pointing out that such can only be a skirmish, that the bosses will seek to claw back any gains, and that only by becoming their own bosses can that change. Similarly, as Engels argued where businesses are being threatened with closure the Marxists argue not for nationalisation, but for the establishment of a Co-operative.

“The matter has nothing to do with either Sch[ulze]-Delitzsch or with Lassalle. Both propagated small cooperatives, the one with, the other without state help; however, in both cases the cooperatives were not meant to come under the ownership of already existing means of production, but create alongside the existing capitalist production a new cooperative one. My suggestion requires the entry of the cooperatives into the existing production. One should give them land which otherwise would be exploited by capitalist means: as demanded by the Paris Commune, the workers should operate the factories shut down by the factory-owners on a cooperative basis. That is the great difference. And Marx and I never doubted that in the transition to the full communist economy we will have to use the cooperative system as an intermediate stage on a large scale. It must only be so organised that society, initially the state, retains the ownership of the means of production so that the private interests of the cooperative vis-a-vis society as a whole cannot establish themselves. It does not matter that the Empire has no domains; one can find the form, just as in the case of the Poland debate, in which the evictions would not directly affect the Empire.”

See:Engels on Co-operatives

As I have argued in my blog “Why Marxists Do Not Call for Nationalisation” Marxists argue for a solution based on workers self-activity, which can act to develop class consciousness, and at the same time change the material conditions of the class – the establishment of co-operatives – not for nationalisation, but that does not mean that Marxists argue AGAINST nationalisation, in favour of private ownership. We take nationalisation for what it is, a more mature, and therefore, more historically progressive form of Capitalist ownership, and defend it against less mature. Less progressive forms such as private ownership, but that defence does not prevent us arguing for going beyond that form, arguing that it is reactionary compared with workers ownership, with the co-operative form.

The demands set out by the CPGB then:

“Against closures and mass sackings communists demand:
· No redundancies. Nationalise threatened workplaces or industries under workers' control.
· Compensation to former owners should be paid only in cases of proven need.
· There must be no business secrets hidden from the workers. The books and data banks of every company must be open to the inspection of specialists appointed by and responsible to the workers. “

Are meaningless. Who are these demands addressed to? If they are addressed to the bourgeois state, then why on Earth would the bourgeois state accede to them? If the state can be forced to accede to them, then the working class must already be in a position of power itself, must have overthrown the bourgeoisie and exercises state power itself!

Defence of Workers Gains

Of course, Marxists can recognise that say the NHS is inefficient, is run in the interests of the capitalists, not the workers and so on, and needs to be superseded by a Health Service owned and controlled by workers, but that does not mean that Marxists will not oppose attempts to private the NHS, to defend the gains already made, and attempt to build on them. That is so despite the fact that the NHS contains nothing that is socialist any more than any other state capitalist institution. In fact, as I have said, the majority of workers would use private medicine if they could afford. The CPGB agree with this concept of defending existing gains. However, when it comes to dealing with the USSR they abandon that method. In a debate on the USSR, we read,

“Comrade Ticktin declared himself amazed than anyone could still hold to a view of defending the USSR state. He described the Soviet Union in the 1960s, when he lived there, as a crude, brutal society. It is possible to demonstrate both theoretically and practically that there was nothing to defend in the USSR state, and any group that does defend it damns itself and shames the left. We should repudiate the regime, not defend it, he added.”

See: CPGB Debate on USSR.
No one can doubt what Comrade Ticktin says about the brutality etc., but to draw from this the conclusion that there is nothing to defend is to lapse into moralism and subjectivism not Marxism. Capitalism itself in the early 19th century was pretty brutal too, it sat by and watched a quarter of the population of Ireland starve to death in the name of the Free market, for instance. And for much of its existence from its inception in the 15th century, Capitalism was not even more productive than the existing feudal economy. Yet that did not prevent Marx from identifying the process of which it was a part, and the fact that viewed dialectically and not formalistically, Capitalism was progressive, precisely because of the potential it represented. The NHS could be viewed in exactly the same way, it is pretty brutal in the way it denies some workers the treatments and the medication they require, even more brutal in the fact that instead of making some workers better it kills them through MRSA, and other infections that arise because of inadequate cleaning, a concentration on economies of scale to save money at the expense of patient care and so on. It like Stalinism is run by a self serving bureaucracy, with an almost feudal set of patriarchal staff relations and so on. Yet, I am sure that Comrade Ticktin would defend it as against a return of private medicine.

Those comrades at the CPGB debate who argued, “that what should be defended is not a state, but the gains of the working class in and against any system. In Britain, for example, we defend the gains of the working class in the form of a health service and so on, without, of course, defending British capitalism, under which those gains have been won.” Were at least partially correct then, but too mealy mouthed in their response. Marxists do not just defend the gains of the working class in the form of a Health Service without defending British capitalism, they defend the Health Service itself, even in its current form, as against a return to private medicine. Marxists should, but largely don’t, argue that the best way to prevent a return of private medicine is for the health Service to be adequate to the needs of Workers, which would mean supporting measures here and now to exercise some form of democratic control over it, by workers and patients. But, in line with what I have said above, it is necessary for Marxists to set out to workers why any such control either will not be given, or will only be given under extreme duress, and will be undermined and taken back by the State, and why, therefore, it is necessary for workers to establish their own Health Service owned and controlled by them. If we apply that to the USSR then it is clear that the workers of the USSR could not set up some other State, some other complex of economic and social relations apart from the actual State that constituted the USSR. Defending the gains made by workers could not be separated from defending the actual territory of the USSR itself. That does not mean defending Stalinism, any more than defending the NHS against private medicine means defending the bureaucratic, inefficient nature of the NHS. On the contrary, just as the best means of defending the workers gains in Britain meant going beyond the limitations of the NHS, so too the best means of defending the workers gains in the USSR meant going beyond Stalinism.

Comrade Ticktin’s argument ends up in reality no different from that of the Bureaucratic Collectivists who denied that the USSR was a Workers State in order to get round the problem that they did not like what they saw, could not reconcile themselves with a reactionary form covering a progressive content. The Moral Socialists, the Economic Romanticists of the Sismondi School had exactly the same problem in relation to their disgust for the horrors of Capitalism. The Narodniks later suffered the same problem as Lenin polemicised against. It is the same methodology that leads some Marxists to deny that the Labour party is a Workers Party, because they disdain the fact that a Workers Party could have such a Programme, and set that outside time and space against their vision of some perfect Workers Party to which all others have to compare. Hillel has the advantage over the Bureaucratic Collectivists that unlike most of them, he has at least undertaken a serious study of the USSR, and rightly concluded that the new class they believe to have sprung miraculously into existence, is in fact a chimera. Unfortunately, he is then left with the problem of explaining what the State in the USSR was. He ends up then denying a basic tenet of Marxism and positing a State, which is not a class state, a state which is not the instrument of any class! Such is the consequence of abandoning Marxist objectivity.





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