The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (9/18)
If the 1995 French Presidential Election was one fought between the crook and the fascist, the 2016 US Presidential Election was one fought out between the crook and the crooked moron, and this time the crooked moron won. Clinton represented a continuation of the same failed centrist (conservative-social-democratic) politics of Obama, and all the shenanigans involved in depriving Sanders of the nomination, meant that many working-class voters had no great incentive to turn out to vote. Unfortunately, the Democrats have learned nothing from that and repeated the process selecting Biden and Harris. Its only the catastrophe that is Trump that offers the Democrats the possibility of victory, in a similar way that victory was handed to Macron, but, as I wrote some time ago, it will be Pyrrhic, because, as with Macron, the inevitable disillusion that will follow, will drive even larger numbers into apathy, or, even worse, into the hands of someone else on the Right, who, unlike Trump, will not be handicapped by idiocy. The positive aspect of US politics, and the same applies with the legacy of Corbynism, is that, despite the ability of the party establishment to impose Biden on them, a large rank and file base has been created within the party, as well as a periphery outside it, and it is that where the future development lies, not what happens within the corridors of the White House or Congress, and the same applies in Britain. Indeed, that is another reason why a further abandonment of principle and programme purely for ephemeral electoral advantage is a stupid strategy.
But, Paul's mistake is similar. He sees everything through the same parliamentarist lens, focusing on the need to get a Labour government elected, rather than on the need to develop the huge rank and file base in the party that Corbynism brought with it. Elections are merely a means of socialists undertaking concentrated politics amongst the ranks of the working-class. Parliaments are merely an index of the maturity of class consciousness. Our aim is the development of the latter, and there is no point winning majorities in parliament without it. The failure of Corbynism, as with the failure of Melonchon in France, is that, whilst they offered a diet of old style progressive social-democracy, it continued to be dressed largely in the old stale, statist garb that carried with it all the old questions of how such a programme would be financed, at the same time as failing to place this programme in the kind of internationalist framework that any such successful programme requires. Both Corbyn and Melonchon presented statist, and nationalist solutions that, in many ways, were not dissimilar to those proposed by the fascists, and necessarily so.
Certainly, in 2017, had Corbyn been seen as more positively pro-EU, Labour might have won more seats, depriving May of the possibility of forming a government, even with the support of the DUP. Who knows, even the wreckers, exposed by the leaked internal LP report, might have found themselves under pressure from the progressive sections of the bourgeoisie to fall into line, with Labour being seen as the best hope of preventing Brexit. Certainly, pressure from the representatives of big capital might have ensured that the media gave Labour a fairer hearing to that end. But, now, Labour is in an even worse position. Starmer suffers from the same problem as Corbyn in that he cannot win back all those middle class, Liberal and Green voters, and certainly not the SNP, and, probably, Plaid voters, who still seek to overturn Brexit, because, so far, he has simply rolled over and played dead. Indeed, if Paul had his way he would offer those voters, and particularly the people of Scotland no hope as far as Brexit is concerned, leaving them driven into the hands of the SNP, and into another reactionary nationalist solution, this time in the form of Scottish nationalism. However, in addition, he has also ditched much of the progressive social-democratic agenda of Corbyn, giving no real stimulus for all those more radical members who joined Labour to hang around, or to vote Labour.
And, rather than challenging this conservative social-democratic (neo-liberal) agenda, from a progressive stance, Paul does so from a reactionary stance. He says,
“As for Brexit, by the time Labour takes power it will have taken a specific form — either in a Free Trade Agreement or via a WTO-only Brexit — and there will be a points-based immigration system.
Labour’s offer should be to amend the FTA — or to seek one in the case of No Deal — in a way that gives maximum access to the Single Market; and to reform the points-based immigration system based on principles of social justice, while offering full UK citizenship and voting rights to every EU citizen who wants it. For clarity, we should not try to build a political narrative around reversing Brexit or a return to Freedom of Movement.”
In other words positioning yourself on the side of reaction even in relation to neo-liberalism! But, its also Utopian, making the same delusory mistake that Corbyn made, and that the Brexiteers continue to purvey that it is some way possible to achieve a deal that provides for any meaningfully equal access to the single market without actually being a part of it, and being subject to its rules! Its precisely what Marx warned of in relation to the coup of Louis Bonaparte, whereby even the most elementary liberal principle becomes described as Socialism, used in a pejorative and threatening tone. And, if more evidence of that is required then we only have to look at Paul's further comments and adoption of reactionary shibboleths. He says,
“Some parts of the left see this “family, hard work and decency” agenda as intrinsically reactionary, or as belonging to Blue Labour traditionalists.
But I don’t. To me, family, fairness, hard work and decency sound like something more than “values”: they describe a survival strategy adopted by working class people in the face of neoliberalism.”
His following paragraphs are simply an apologia for how such reactionary sentiments could be interpreted. The point is that we have to deal with the real world, and not a world of semantics. We have to deal with a real world in which what those who promote those ideas really mean by them is diametrically opposed to the conclusions Paul would like people to draw from them. They may indeed, be a survival strategy adopted by working-class people, just as in the past, for oppressed people, religion acted as such a strategy, being for them “the opium of the people”, relieving the pain of their existence. It does not mean that socialists should acquiesce in such solutions and diversions. The answer to the people's misery has never been religion or for socialists to become priests!
Paul's prescription is precisely what Marx warned against in relation to the ratchet to the Right seen in France in 1848. Speaking of the liberal democrats and social democrats, Marx says,
“They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: “property, family, religion, order.””
(The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1)
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