Labour, The Left, and The Working Class – A Response To Paul Mason - The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (2/18)

The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (2/18) 

The idea that Paul should have taken from the early Comintern is not his confusion of the Workers Government with a Popular Front, but is the concept of the United Front, i.e. “march separately strike together.” The aim of the Left should be to oppose the Right, and specifically the development of the authoritarian right, to defend the gains of bourgeois democracy against its attacks, but to do so, by purely revolutionary proletarian means.

The idea put forward by Paul that the Comintern wanted a Workers Government to “suppress the far right using the rule of law, take transformational steps in economic and social policy”, is not just wrong, but bizarre. The whole point of the tactic, based around the principle of the United Front, was to mobilise the class in extra-parliamentary action!

Trotsky sets that out in his Program of Action For France, written in 1934. 

“In the struggle against fascism, reaction and war, the proletariat accepts the aid of petty-bourgeois groupings (pacifists, League for the Rights of Man, the Common Front, etc.), but such alliances can be only of secondary importance. Above all, the task is to secure the united action of the working class itself in the factories and the workers’ neighbourhoods of industrial centres. The alliance of the important workers’ organisations (Communist Party, Socialist Party, CGT, CGTU, Communist League) will have no revolutionary value unless it is oriented toward the creation of: 

• Committees of struggle representing the mass itself (embryo soviets); 

• Workers’ militia, always united in action, even though organised by various parties and organisations... 

We are thus firm partisans of a Workers’ and Peasants’ State, which will take the power from the exploiters. To win the majority of our working-class allies to this program is our primary aim. 

Meanwhile, as long as the majority of the working class continues on the basis of bourgeois democracy, we are ready to defend it with all our forces against violent attacks from the Bonapartist and fascist bourgeoisie. 

However, we demand from our class brothers who adhere to ‘democratic’ socialism that they be faithful to their ideas, that they draw inspiration from the ideas and methods not of the Third Republic but of the Convention of 1793... 

Our slogan is not the disarming of the fascist gangs of finance capital by finance capital’s own police. We refuse to spread the criminal illusion that a capitalist government can actually proceed to the disarming of the capitalist bands. The exploited must defend themselves against the capitalists. 

Arming of the proletariat, arming of the poor peasants! 

People’s Antifascist Militia! 

The exploiters, who are but a tiny minority, will recoil before the unleashing of civil war; the fascist and reactionary bands will lose their audacity only if the workers are armed and lead the masses.” 

So much then for Paul's proposal that we should be guided by the Comintern ideas on the Workers Government, which itself flows from the tactic of the United Front, but that we should simultaneously abandon demands to “defund the police”!

The significance of this can be seen today, in the US, particularly in black working-class communities under attack from fascists, and from racist cops, where that does not amount to the same thing.  That is consistent with Marx's analysis from 1848. In 1848, the small industrial proletariat across Europe rose up behind the industrial bourgeoisie, and petty-bourgeoisie, to demand political democracy, and bourgeois rights and freedoms. In other words to overthrow the old feudal, aristocratic political regime. In Britain this movement had begun at the start of the century, manifest, for example, in the events of Peterloo, where the bourgeoisie, supported by large numbers of the petty-bourgeoisie, such as the self-employed hand-loom weavers and assorted artisans, rose up, supported by the small, nascent working-class, to demand bourgeois-democratic reforms. In 1832, eventually, the bourgeoisie won those reforms, but again the working-class were not included. The workers continued their demands through the Chartist movement, reflecting the growth of the working-class, as industrial capital expanded. It too is defeated, but the workers again throw their weight behind the industrial bourgeoisie in a struggle against the landed aristocracy. It results in the Repeal of the Corn Laws, which represents the victory of the industrial bourgeoisie, not only over the landed aristocracy, but also over the other sections of capital, such as merchant capital and financial capital that had been in a symbiotic alliance with the aristocracy. Marx addressed the Communist League about the situation in Germany.  It is in itself  succinct response to Paul's agenda.

“At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organisation in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner. Instead of lowering themselves to the level of an applauding chorus, the workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organisation of the workers’ party, both secret and open, and alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence. How serious the bourgeois democrats are about an alliance in which the proletariat has equal power and equal rights is demonstrated by the Breslau democrats, who are conducting a furious campaign in their organ, the Neue Oder Zeitung, against independently organised workers, whom they call ‘socialists’. In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past.” 

(Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League London, March 1850 )

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