Structure & Struggle A Reply To Mike McNair - Part 4

Against The Sectarians

Mike is also factually incorrect when he claims it was,

“the Georgist electoral movement Engels recommended to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky”.

Engels did no such thing. Quite the opposite. In the US Preface to “The Condition of The Working Class”, Engels attacked the narrow programme of Henry George, saying,

“And it seems to me that the Henry George platform, in its present shape, is too narrow to form the basis for anything but a local movement, or at best for a short-lived phase of the general movement.”

And in his letter to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky he makes his opposition to sects like George's even clearer writing,

“The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own.”

Rather Engels saw the German-American Marxists as having a key role to play, and his advice was for them to orientate to the Knights of Labour, which “aimed at the liberation of the workers by means of co-operatives. They took in all skilled and even unskilled trades, without discrimination on account of sex, race, nationality or religion. The organisation reached the highest point of its activity during the eighties, when, under the pressure of the masses, the leaders of the Order were compelled to consent to an extensive strike movement. Its membership at that time was over 700,000, including 60,000 Negroes. However, on account of the opportunist tactics of the leaders, who were opposed to revolutionary class struggle, the order forfeited its prestige among the masses. Its activity expired the next decade.” (Note 2 to US preface)

Engels was all in favour of the various socialist sects uniting, he wrote,

“To bring about this result, the unification of the various independent bodies into one national Labor Army, with no matter how inadequate a provisional platform, provided it be a truly working-class platform — that is the next great step to be accomplished in America. To effect this, and to make that platform worthy of the cause, the Socialist Labor Party can contribute a great deal, if they will only act in the same way as the European Socialists have acted at the time when they were but a small minority of the working class.”

But, as his comment above demonstrates his overriding concern, as had been that of Marx in setting up the First International was to fuse that socialist movement with the real working class movement. It was the sectarianism of Henry George, and of the Socialist Labour Party in failing to heed that advice that allowed the Opportunism of the leadership of the Knights of Labour to go unchallenged, without an alternative for the membership being provided. Indeed, that is a direct parallel to the sectarianism of the British Left in relation to the LP today.

Mike's comments about the SDF and ILP, acting to pressurise the Trade Union leaders, from outside, to set up the LP, because they could no longer guarantee the workers votes for the Liberals, are equally misplaced. As Engels pointed out, the Tories were themselves using Keir Hardie to split the Liberal vote, and financed his 1892 election campaign. And in 1895, when the ILP stood 28 candidates, all of them including Hardie were defeated. As for the SDF I have elsewhere - 1905 Reform & Revolution – described the role played by one of its members John Ward who was leader of the Navvies Union in London, and who was at the meetings of the Labour Representation Committee. Ward was one of the first Labour MP's, being elected in Stoke in 1906, and moved increasingly rightward, recruiting Labour Battalions as part of the intervention forces against the Bolsheviks. In the above article I have given extensive reports on the 1905 TUC Congress held in Stoke, where the decisions on setting up the Labour Party were taken. It includes, details of the meetings held around the Congress too. I don't think it is at all true that it was pressure from sects like the SDF or ILP, let alone their electoral success that led the TUC leaders to set up the LP. I think it was genuine rank and file pressure from the actual working-class, alongside the need to address the attacks that were being waged against them in Parliament and in the Courts, which brought that about.

Mike says,

“But it (The Left) is in a position to change the relationship of forces both within and outside the Labour Party by uniting itself to fight openly for Marxist politics. Its refusal to do so is a matter of the subjective choices made by small groups due to a false conception of the ‘revolutionary party’. ”

This reminds me of Marx's critique of Proudhon in the “Poverty of Philosophy”, that I referred to earlier.

Marx writes,

“When, consequently, in order to save principles as much as to save history, we ask ourselves why a particular principle was manifested in the 11th century or in the 18th century rather than in any other, we are necessarily forced to examine minutely what men were like in the 11th century, what they were like in the 18th, what were their respective needs, their productive forces, their mode of production, the raw materials of their production – in short, what were the relations between man and man which resulted from all these conditions of existence. To get to the bottom of all these questions – what is this but to draw up the real, profane history of men in every century and to present these men as both the authors and the actors of their own drama? But the moment you present men as the actors and authors of their own history, you arrive – by detour – at the real starting point, because you have abandoned those eternal principles of which you spoke at the outset...

Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently so long as the struggle itself of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society, these theoreticians are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary.”

But, what is this development of the productive forces that “ are not yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society? It cannot be simply the development of Trades Union struggle, whose limits Marx had so lucidly described in Value, Price and Profit. Nor can it be the kind of Lassallean Statism that he condemned in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, and which Engels condemned in numerous places including his Critique of the Erfurt Programme. It can, in fact, only be in the basic element of Marx and Engels ideas about the working-class liberating itself through its own self-activity. And that is what Marx sets out here when he says that it is to be found in the ideas of the Utopians. They were Utopians only in the sense that they did not and could not at that stage understand the role of the working-class in bringing about these new forms “within the bosom of the bourgeoisie”. In particular, Marx could not be clearer about what he meant in this respect than when he wrote in his Inaugural Address to the First International,

“But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by Robert Owen; the workingmen’s experiments tried on the Continent were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848.”

In fact, this can be read as following almost entirely logically from Marx's comments above. We can have no doubt about exactly what this development is of the productive forces that provides a “glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society?” when we combined it with Marx's statement in Capital,

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises. into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale.”

Mike fails to ask the question of what is the basis of these “subjective choices” their false conception of the revolutionary party. Marxists have frequently theorised the role of the Trades Union bureaucracy, and understood it as stemming from the material conditions within society, in particular the role of that bureaucracy, in standing between the workers and the bosses, its role dependent upon a continuation of the existing system in order that they can continue to act as such a mediator. Yet, it has not, located the explanation for its own role, its own actions in the same way! In fact, the sects are almost exclusively made up of intellectuals and academics - even those who have taken up employment largely come from, and still orient to this milieu. It is not surprising then that such individuals privilege the role of ideas over material conditions when theorising class struggle. They see their role as educators of and lecturers to, the working-class, administrators and organisers of its actions, rather than facilitators of the workers own self-organisation. In an article written 20 years ago, the role of the material conditions, the social background of this Left was described by Simon Clarke in an article “Crisis of Socialism Or Crisis Of the State?”, in Capital & Class 42, Winter 1990. He writes,

“The social base of state socialism lies in the stratum of intellectual workers, including such groups as managers, administrators, scientists, technicians, engineers, social workers and teachers as well as the intelligentsia more narrowly defined.” These groups believe that the key to a more just society lies “in their mobilisation of their technical, administrative and intellectual expertise... The ability of this stratum to achieve its rationalist ambitions depends on its having access to positions of social and political power.”

So, it is not surprising then that we see class struggle represented as being a matter of ideological struggle, represented by the need to pass this or that resolution, to win control of this or that union or Labour Movement organisation, and the way this plays into the factional struggles of the sects. It is not surprising that working-class “self-activity” is reduced to nothing more than Economistic struggles rather than a struggle to break out of the constraints of existing structures, and to create new alternative working-class structures imminently opposed to those of Capital and the social relation it reproduces, including the ideas that flow from it.

Clarke continues,

Kronstadt Sailors

“For the working-class the Party is a means of mobilising and generalising its opposition to Capital and its State, and of building autonomous forms of collective organisation, while for the intellectual stratum it is a means of achieving power over capital and the state... As soon as the party has secured state power, by whatever means, it has fulfilled its positive role as far as the intellectual stratum is concerned. The latter's task is now to consolidate and exploit its position of power to secure the implementation of the Party's programme in the interests of the 'working class'. Once the Party has seized power, any opposition it encounters from the working class is immediately identified as sectional or factional opposition to the interests of the working class as a whole, the latter being identified with the Party as its self-conscious representative.”

Clarke echoes the view expressed by Draper saying,

“The distinction between the Bolshevik and social democratic variants of state socialism should not be ignored, but it is more a matter of degree than of substance. The 'degeneration' of the Russian Revolution was not a matter of Lenin's intolerance, nor of Trotsky's militarism, nor of Stalin's personality, nor of the economic backwardness nor of the relatively small size of the Russian working class, nor of the autocratic character of the Russian State, nor of the embattled position of the revolutionary regime, although all these factors played their part in determining the extent of the degeneration. The degeneration was already inherent in the class character of the revolution which underlay the statist conception of socialism which it adopted as its project.”

Moreover, Mike McNair's conception of sect, and sectarianism is completely misplaced. An organisation of 1 may not be a sect or sectarian, whereas an organisation of 1 million can be! What makes an organisation a sect and its actions sectarian is not its size, or even its refusal to join with others, but the fact that it places its own interests above those of the class as a whole. It is not sectarian to remain independent of other sects, and to refuse to join with them, if doing so would mean being tied to their sectarian attitude to the class. The first responsibility of a Marxist is to the class, and its interests. That means doing whatever can be done to assist the class in its own self-organisation, and self-activity irrespective of the inadequate basis on which it does that at any particular stage. That was why Engels advised the US socialists to work inside the Knights of Labour, and thereby to try to raise its level up. It was the same approach he and Marx took in respect of the workers and the German Democrats, and later in their attitude towards the unification of the Eisenachers and Lassalleans. If sections of the Left can unite then that is good, but only on the basis of a non-sectarian attitude to the existing working class, and Labour Movement, including the Labour Party. All experience suggests that is not likely. Under those circumstances I agree with Engels comment,

“The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own.”

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