Lessons For The Left
Lesson 7 – Strategy, Tactics and Principles (ii)
Paul says,
“As a result of this they have consolidated a new and highly defensible “position” (in the Gramscian metaphor): a populist, authoritarian government, with the support of both the socially-liberal middle class and parts of the traditional working class, which promises to “move fast and break things”, including all the traditional checks and balances in our unwritten constitution.”
But, who exactly is it that has consolidated this position? Not the ruling class, or at least its dominant component, the owners of fictitious capital. This is near to being the worst of all possible worlds for them. The last thing they require is a hard Brexit government in Britain, which simply compounds the instability created by Trump in the US. As Lenin described it in The State and Revolution,
“A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell ... it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.”
The last thing it wants is to have its direct access to the levers of power disrupted by the intervention of authoritarians; the last thing it seeks is these secure and stable relations disrupted by rogue elements who promise only to break things and create unnecessary disruption. And, the fact is that the rogues that propose to do so, do not propose such actions in the name of the ruling class, but in the name of their class enemies, the reactionary petty-bourgeois. They must operate in such manner, precisely in order to undermine and break the power of the capitalist state, which acts in the name not of the petty-bourgeoisie, but of the bourgeoisie proper.
Paul comments,
“As Gramsci taught — a mass party of the working class has to not only mobilise and represent its own base: it has to enable its members to assume the intellectual and moral leadership of the whole of society. That is the meaning of the term commonly associated with Gramscian politics: hegemony.”
True, but its necessary to learn to walk before you run. Moreover, hegemony is achieved by first asserting the interests of the revolutionary class, and thereby showing to the rest of society that it is only those interests that can liberate society as a whole. It is not achieved by liquidating your own ideas and programme, so as to simply chase after the illusion of a mere parliamentary majority.
Paul says,
“Only Labour can create a left government”
But, the current Labour Party cannot create a Workers Government, and Paul's suggested programme certainly does not amount to that. Its necessary to change the politics of Labour to have any chance of creating a “Left government”, let alone anything approaching a “Workers Government”. And, having changed the politics of the LP, a precondition is to clear out all of those right-wing, Blair-right, and soft Left MP's – those who, in 1917, would have been the components of the Kadets and Octobrists – and the same applies to all of the Labour Councillors, and other elected representatives. But, before any consideration of creating a “Left government” becomes possible, it is necessary for that party to have won broad support for its politics amongst the working-class itself. To try to establish a “Left government” without having done so is simply dangerous adventurism that would lead to disaster. Of the kind that Engels warned against in The Peasant War in Germany. As Lenin says, quoting Engels,
“Universal suffrage, he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is
“the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state."
The petty-bourgeois democrats, such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and also their twin brothers, all the social-chauvinists and opportunists of Western Europe, expect just this “more” from universal suffrage. They themselves share, and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage “in the present-day state” is really capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realization”.
(State and Revolution)
And, herein lies the problem in Paul's approach, which makes the winning of an election, and the formation of an unprincipled electoral coalition so as to achieve that, the central objective, whereas the real task is to develop the kind of programme, including not just the required “Economic” demands, but also the required political demands around which the class struggle can be waged, and a majority be formed. The point about hegemony, here, is that its not a question of winning over those conservative voters one by one. Its a question of changing the nature of the ruling ideas more like a meme. The point that Marx, Engels and Lenin make is that if the advanced section of the working-class is large enough, and clear enough in its ideas, it drags behind it, these conservative elements, naturally, or at least neutralises them, because, within its milieu, these ideas become commonplace. Trying to win over, one by one, conservative and reactionary voters, or trying to win them over wholesale, by appeasing them, is a fool's errand.
That is precisely why, at the present time, the focus must be for the Left to clarify its own ideas, and to sharpen its own programme. It is necessary first to organise and educate all of those new forces that have been drawn into the political struggle since 2015, forces that are centred in the cities, but which are also present amongst the youth in those old decaying towns. Today, they form the vanguard that must be forged to lead the way forward, in the same way that Lenin rejected the appeals of the Narodniks to appeal to the old sources of Peasant Socialism, and instead had a precision focus on the industrial workers in the large conurbations. Properly forge the tip of the blade and it will enable the rest of the sword to follow behind it.
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