Part 3
Economism
Elson then goes on to identify what I think is the core of the problem of the Left’s strategy – a problem she correctly says Purdy and prior to not themselves overcome, but which I will argue later she does not either.
“The Gap between the two is sometimes bridged by the belief that a vigorously pursued economism can precipitate a revolutionary crisis. But, so long as the means of production are a form of Capital, the struggle for better terms of exploitation is inherently limited, for Capital retains the initiative. A clear analysis of these limits is given by Marx in ‘Wages, Price and Profit’. These limits cannot be overcome by a rhetoric of class militancy and solidarity; they can only be pushed back by attenuating the relation between the means of production and capital, loosening the grip of dead labour over living labour. ”
(ibid p99)
I have set out in the past examples of this approach by the Left. Anti-cuts, anti-privatisation campaigns remain securely on the terrain of bourgeois relations. They appear as “political” struggles because they are fought against “political” rather than industrial bosses. But, the terms of the struggle remain Economistic through and through. The struggle is limited to demanding that a less powerful private employer not replace a powerful state Capitalist employer, for example. That is it leaves the workers struggling solely over the terms of their exploitation, not questioning the fact of that exploitation in the first place! The bifurcation of the Left’s approach is mirrored here in its demand only that as part of mitigating this exploitation it be given “Workers Control”, a demand that is completely ridiculous, and simply reflects that separation between the Minimum and Maximum Programmes, because the reality is that workers could only ever secure such meaningful Control under conditions at least approaching a revolutionary situation. In effect, the demand for Workers Control only acts as a cover for what is a thoroughly Economistic solution here and now, just as Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme criticised the Lassalleans, for the use of the demand for “democratic control” over state sponsored Co-ops. More lately even that has been dropped. Little of the Left’s programme for defending the NHS, for instance, raises the demand even for greater democratic control, let alone Workers’ control, and therefore collapses into an Economism that demands workers in the NHS limit themselves to defending their continued exploitation, and that patients defend the current heavily bureaucratised, inefficient, state capitalist provision they receive.
As Trotsky wrote,
"It would of course be a disastrous error, an outright deception, to assert that the road to socialism passes, not through the proletarian revolution, but through nationalization by the bourgeois state of various branches of industry and their transfer into the hands of the workers’ organizations.", and
"If the participation of the workers in the management of production is to be lasting, stable, “normal,” it must rest upon class collaboration, and not upon class struggle. Such a class collaboration can be realized only through the upper strata of the trade unions and the capitalist associations. There have been not a few such experiments: in Germany (“economic democracy”), in Britain (“Mondism”), etc. Yet, in all these instances, it was not a case of workers’ control over capital, but of the subserviency of the labor bureaucracy to capital. Such subserviency, as experience shows, can last for a long time: depending on the patience of the proletariat.
The closer it is to production, to the factory, to the shop, the less possible such a regime is, for here it is a matter of the immediate, vital interests of the workers, and the whole process unfolds under their very eyes. workers’ control through factory councils is conceivable only on the basis of sharp class struggle, not collaboration. But this really means dual power in the enterprises, in the trusts, in all the branches of industry, in the whole economy.
What state regime corresponds to workers’ control of production? It is obvious that the power is not yet in the hands of the proletariat, otherwise we would have not workers’ control of production but the control of production by the workers’ state as an introduction to a regime of state production on the foundations of nationalization. What we are talking about is workers’ control under the capitalist regime, under the power of the bourgeoisie. However, a bourgeoisie that feels it is firmly in the saddle will never tolerate dual power in its enterprises. workers’ control consequently, can be carried out only under the condition of an abrupt change in the relationship of forces unfavorable to the bourgeoisie and its state. Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from them, and then also ownership of the means of production. Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the failing back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word.
If the bourgeois is already no longer the master, that is, not entirely the master, in his factory, then it follows that he is also no longer completely the master in his state. This means that to the regime of dual power in the factories corresponds the regime of dual power in the state."
And in industrial struggles too the same approach can be seen, for example, over Vestas. Faced with the threat of closure, and even under conditions where workers have occupied, and therefore, secured for themselves possession, if not ownership, of the means of production, the Left limits its demands for the workers to once again submit themselves to exploitation, by demands that they limit themselves only to consideration of being exploited by a State Capitalist rather than a private Capitalist. Nothing in any of this deals with the needs of today, whilst looking after the needs of tomorrow. None of it has any transitional quality that subverts the present Mode of Production by opposing to it the Mode of Production of tomorrow, none of it leads workers to such a set of ideas, or any ideas other than purely reformist ideas of working within the current system. Indeed, where the Revolutionary Left does use Transitional Demands plucked from Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, it does so without any real understanding of the nature of that programme or those demands. The whole point about the Transitional Programme is that it is only Transitional in a situation that is itself already pre-revolutionary. The demand for a Workers’ Government, for example, is not just a demand for the election of a Left Party committed to some kind of radical programme. Still less is it a demand that should be raised in the present situation where not only does no such Party, or even substantial number of politicians, in such a Party, exist, but where even if they did is there any chance of the working class voting them into power (witness those 75 votes!). It is a demand that only has meaning under conditions where the working class is already actively mobilised, where it is acting as a powerful alternative force in civil society – through mass strikes, occupations of factories etc - and where it can act to mobilise direct, effective pressure on to the members of that Government, through its own developing political structures. Outside those conditions simply selecting this or that Transitional Demand for use in a particular situation is no more revolutionary than picking out this or that item from a Restaurant Menu.
Even where it recognises the contradiction in such types of response, for example describing the class nature of the Capitalist State, whilst calling for workers to limit their demands to their continued subjection to it, the Left does not draw the necessary conclusions, but instead rationalises it within that bifurcated historical view of reform today revolution tomorrow (maybe). It says that the demand for workers to limit themselves to demanding their continued exploitation by the State, to limit themselves to demanding that the bosses’ state act in their interests, is necessary to “not let the state off the hook”, to dispossess workers of their illusions in that state and so on. Of course, absolutely none of that provides workers with a practical solution today, or provides them with an alternative socialist solution that subverts bourgeois society. As Elson puts it,
“Others, who recognise the material limits to Economism, nevertheless oursue an Economistic practice in the belief that this will bring the working class to a realisation that it is unable to protect, and advance, its interests in a capitalist society, and will, therefore, be convinced of the necessity for socialism, and become ready for a revolutionary seizure of state power. But, there is no necessary connection between the two. In itself, the recognition of the limitations of, say, a wages offensive, may result in de-politicisation, a disillusioned quiescence; ot it may result in a search for other potential causes besides Capitalism, possibly to a receptiveness to fascist ideas. People do need to feel that theyc an do something here and now to change social relations; they become tired of waiting until sufficient numbers of other people have been ‘converted’ to Socialism to make ‘the’ revolution possible. In recognising the limits to Economism, we must be careful not to retreat from all practical activity into a politics of ideology. As Marx and Engels put it:
‘In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things.’ (German ideology, p. 62)
But, there is also the opposite danger, of concentrating on practical intervention in the current conjuncture, and losing sight of the future, of the goal of a socialist society.
Grasping the simultaneity of the struggle against Capitalism and for Socialism seems to me most important. The problem is:
‘How can the present be welded to the future, so that while satisfying the urgent necessities of the one we may work effectively to create and anticipate the other?’ (Gramsci, Selected Political Writings, 1977, p.65)”
(ibid pp 99-100)
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