The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (15/18)
The actions of the Spanish Stalinists were driven by the machinations in Moscow. In the Third Period, the Spanish Stalinists refused to adopt the strategy of the United Front to defend the Popular Front government against the increasing attacks of fascists. Such defence, as Trotsky set out in his Action Programme for France, does not at all mean having to water down or liquidate your own politics and organisation. On the contrary, the principle of "march separately strike together" means that you maintain your own organisation, and that, if anything, you intensify your criticism of the politics and tactics of the bourgeois parties and reformist workers' parties, illuminating their deficiency, even in confronting the fascist menace, whilst standing alongside, in action, all of the workers that continue to have illusions in those parties. If we apply that, in practice, now, in relation to tactics inside the Labour Party, then, far from the Left liquidating its organisation and politics, in order to pursue a chimerical broad alliance/Popular Front of forces behind Starmer, it means we should do the opposite. Now is the time that the Left needs to insist upon theoretical clarity, defence of principle, and struggle around appropriate class struggle demands, and a clinical dissection of the bourgeois politics of Starmer, let alone those to his Right, who are, in fact, the forces he is allying with, not the Left. A problem with the Left, in the previous period, was precisely such a lack of clarity and discipline, lining up as Corbyn cheerleaders, which, thereby, failed to criticise his left-reformism, and more seriously his reactionary economic nationalism, which acted to divide and demoralise his base, and the progressive Labour vote.
We should demand, as the Bolsheviks did with Kerensky, that Starmer break with the open representatives of capital in the PLP, and sack those that are in his Shadow Cabinet. But, of course, we know he will not do that, because he is the one who has brought all of those right-wing elements, the ones who did all in their power to undermine Corbyn, into his Shadow Cabinet, whilst sacking the few elements that represented progressive social democracy. Marxists, of course, could never take up any such positions in the Shadow Cabinet, any more than they could occupy such positions in government, precisely because of its bourgeois nature. That is why the Bolsheviks refused to join any such Workers' Government, why Trotsky argued against communists joining the Popular Front governments in Spain, France and elsewhere. We call on the reformists amongst the workers' parties to form Workers Governments and to expel the capitalist elements, act against the interests of capital, and so on, not because we have any intention of joining such formations, but purely because we are not yet strong enough ourselves to take power.
The demand for a Workers Government, as Trotsky sets out in The Transitional Programme, is a demand aimed at the reformist and centrist workers parties, the social-democrats, Stalinists and anarchists, precisely in order to expose them for what they are.
“The experience of Russia demonstrated, and the experience of Spain and France once again confirms, that even under very favourable conditions the parties of petty bourgeois democracy (SRs, Social Democrats, Stalinists, Anarchists) are incapable of creating a government of workers and peasants, that is, a government independent of the bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, the demand of the Bolsheviks, addressed to the Mensheviks and the SRs: “Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power into your own hands!” had for the masses tremendous educational significance. The obstinate unwillingness of the Mensheviks and SRs to take power, so dramatically exposed during the July Days, definitely doomed them before mass opinion and prepared the victory of the Bolsheviks.”
(Trotsky – The Transitional Programme)
So, when, today, the CPGB, for example, calls on Rebecca Long Bailey et al, not to join Starmer's Shadow Cabinet this has nothing to do with the approach of Marxists, or the tactics of the Bolsheviks in 1917, precisely because Long-Bailey is not a Marxist or revolutionary. She is a reformist, and if she wants to join Starmer's Shadow Cabinet that is fine by me, because it is all part and parcel of exposing the inadequate politics of those Left reformists alongside the inadequate politics of the Right reformists. The CPGB's approach gives Left cover for the Left reformists, implying that they are in some way Marxists or revolutionaries whose hands should not be sullied by participation alongside reformists and centrists. They are not. The same is true in relation to their attitude as to whether Syriza should have taken office in Greece, or Corbyn in Britain. They said no, arguing instead for a strategy of extreme opposition. But, the latter is a strategy to be adopted by revolutionaries, when they do not yet have a clear majority behind them. It is not a strategy that Marxists advocate on behalf of reformists and centrists whose inadequate politics we seek to expose to the workers in struggle, precisely by demanding that they break with the bourgeoisie and take power. In fact, has there been any doubt about the bankruptcy of the reformist politics of Syriza as a result of the experience of its role in government; has there been any doubt about the bankruptcy of the Left reformist politics of Corbyn, and of his Stalinist backers, as a result of the disastrous nature of his period as Leader?
The problem in all these cases, be it France and Spain in the 1930's, or Syriza and Corbyn today, is that, unlike the situation in 1917, there is no sizeable revolutionary party able to draw out these lessons, and to win over the majority of the working-class to its banner. That is the task that Marxists have to address, and it is not done by liquidating our programme in a vain electoralist and quixotic search for a broad alliance. In Spain, the Stalinists sought to do that, and maintained a pretence that they were making an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, via their representatives in parliament. The reality was that those bourgeois parliamentarians no longer had the support of that liberal bourgeoisie, which had already lined up with Franco. The parliamentary representatives of the bourgeoisie, or “shadow bourgeoisie”, as Trotsky was to call them, were there only because of the Popular Front, and because of the support given to them by the Stalinists and Socialists. They represented nothing, and the same is true of those forces that Paul now wants us to liquidate our politics in search of.
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