Politics Of the Ghetto - Part 7

Part 7

Marxists, Bourgeois Democracy, and The Workers Party

“Purdy and Prior are not alone in their inadequate analysis of the practice of a Communist Party struggling through the institutions of bourgeois democracy. It is the crucial failure of all the proponents of Euro-communism... It has left the CPGB without any analytical basis for constituting itself a separate organisation from the Labour Party, a fact not lost to the more acute of bourgeois commentators – see the reports in the Financial Times on the 1978 Congress of the CPGB. It has left those Marxists who join the Labour Party without course any of action, reduced to moral critiques of the leadership and token victories in some constituency parties, while Party Conference decisions continue to be ignored.”

(ibid p. 111)

Once again Elson's thirty year old comments are as depressingly relevant today as they were then, in fact, even more so. The Left sects, rather than acting as a transformative force, have contented themselves with being simply an oppositional force. Although the Leninist left has emphasised its opposition to Parliamentarism, its practice has itself been Parliamentarist. Rather than being concerned to actually build the working class, and its organisations, the Left has concentrated on building its own sects – usually at the expense of the movement as a whole - has devoted considerable amounts of time and effort to what amount to little more than studentist debates in various forums, and to winning elections – not bourgeois democratic, in which the Left outside the Workers Party does abysmally – but rather elections of officials, the passing of resolutions which are then ignored, as Elson says above, and so on.

Had the left put just half the effort into building rank and file organisations, whether in the Trade Unions, Co-operatives, or within Communities, that were themselves transformative, in that they encouraged and facilitated, workers themselves to develop their own solutions, they would both have changed the workers material conditions, and thereby consciousness, as well as by passing all of those restrictions they complain that official structures, and its leadership, bureaucracy etc. impose upon them. In so doing they would not only have created powerful forces capable of developing a politics from the ground up, but would also have created the seedbed from which real, militant, working class politicians could have sprung forward, and the kind of real working class conscious support, which is necessary to ensure that resolutions once passed, are adhered to, that politicians and other representatives when selected are truly accountable. Instead the left has settled ror form rather than content, has settled for defending its purity, and pyrrhic victories, in the debating chamber rather than transformation of class consciousness. Ironically, if it had done that, the very process of working with ordinary working class people, in developing such organisations would have built its own forces, would have led to an automatic transmission belt of workers on to the path of a Marxist understanding.

Yet, even today, and more so than thirty years ago, the Left is engaged in a deliberate policy of isolation from the working class and its Party. With even fewer forces than it had then, it is engaged in a fantasy politics of pretending that it is the revolutionary Party in embryo, or that the working class is anxiously waiting for it to create some alternative Workers Party. It would be tempting to compare the situation now with that at the end of the 19th Century when the Labour Party was created, indeed those who every few months announce the establishment of some new initiative to create a Workers party, frequently do. But, the degree to which the situation is similar is not at all conducive to those arguments. At the end of the 19th Century, the situation was one of a working class moving Left. It was a working class, increasingly confident and assertive, especially as the New Unionism, led to the organisation of thousands of unskilled workers. It meant that there was an increasing dissatisfaction with the Liberals, to whom the workers had looked as traditional allies arising from the struggles against the aristocracy. It meant that “Labour” candidates like Keir Hardie, were able to attract considerable support.

Yet, as Engels pointed out, these sects, like the ILP and the SDF, although they had many good elements within them, were deeply flawed organisations, precisely because as with today, they were sects. He was not any more impressed by the Socialist League that split from the SDF. Even in conditions where the class was moving Left, where the sects like the ILP had some electoral success, which the sects today certainly cannot claim, Engels advice to the Marxists like Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling, was to cut them adrift, and go straight to the workers. Where were the mass of workers? Not, in these “communist” sects, but in the Liberal Clubs! That was what they did, and it was largely upon that basis, and the work that they and others like Tom Mann did, which eventually created the forces through the Trade Unions for the establishment of the Labour Party.

And that advice, to ignore the sects – even to the extent that they organised the “more advanced” workers, was the advice that Engels also gave to the American socialists in how to go about creating a Workers Party. It was the advice that he and Marx had set out in the Communist Manifesto, where they said that the Communists do not create any separate Party from the other Workers Parties, the method they had used themselves in Germany, when they had joined the bourgeois Democrats, precisely because although it was a bourgeois Party, it was the means by which to gain the ear of the mass of workers. It is the fundamental basis of Marxism as a transformative movement, to not look to the end product, but to start from where you are, and change it so as to create the end product. As Elson states,

“It seems to me that it is precisely this notion that constitutes a practical, materialist politics, and differentiates Marxism from utopian socialism. As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse,

'If we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange pre-requisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.' (p.151)

A practical, materialist politics certainly does not consist in simply identifying the proletariat as the agent of revolution, and attributing to it some kind of 'will to Socialism', albeit a will which may be temporarily disoriented owing to 'false consciousness'. As Marx wrote of the Civil War in France, the working class,

'have no ideas to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society is itself pregnant.'(The First International and After, p. 213)”
(ibid p.112)

The point is to identify these aspects of Capitalist society, which represents the seeds of the new society, and to develop them, conscious that in doing so, will itself mean a true class struggle, as the bourgeoisie attempt to constrain such development within limits that do not threaten the process of accumulation, and do not threaten its bases of power in society. It is to develop the kinds of workers organisations upon them that both further workers power and control within society, and facilitate the successful pursuit of that class struggle. Doing so means moving off the terrain of the bourgeoisie, moving away from Economism, and towards proletarian property and democracy.