The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (18/18)
The other problem with the position of the POUM and the Anarchists, in relation to the Popular Front, was their failure to properly calculate the strength of their own forces as against the strength of their opponents, in particular the Stalinists. They based themselves on formal logic, rather than the dialectic, in determining how those current relations of forces were likely to change in the course of the war. In particular, as Trotsky says, they failed to take into account the fact that, behind the Spanish Stalinists stood the USSR, as well as the Communist parties of France, Britain, Italy and even the United States. Money and weapons could be shipped to the Spanish Stalinists, bypassing the republican government, and cutting off such supplies to the fighters of the other workers' parties, who, as Orwell's account demonstrates, were woefully ill quipped. The Spanish Stalinists had all of the power of the Communist International for propaganda, which daily spread lies about the other workers parties.
Paul makes similar errors of calculation. We saw the extent to which the bourgeois media went into overdrive to attack Corbyn and McDonnell, for example. Already the narrative of that media in the service of the Right is clearly established, unless Starmer completely submits to their demands by moving against the Left in the Party, and quickly re-establishes the dominance of the Blair-rights. It is that Starmer himself remained and served as a prominent member of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet, and is, thereby, tainted by it. The Blair-rights, and those to their Right in the party, supported by the bourgeois media, will tolerate Starmer only so long as he continues along that trajectory, and they are supported not just by all of that vast machinery of the bourgeois state and media, but also by the machinery of the party itself, as well as the bureaucracy of the trades union movement, which will increasingly move against those within its own ranks seen as remnants of Corbynism.
Paul wants to wage a battle of semantics by taking the battle cry of the reactionaries of “family, hard work and decency”, and defining it in positive terms. But, it is irrelevant how Paul, or even the whole of the Left he seeks to rally, want to define this slogan, because the reality is that, in terms of propagandistic firepower, we are massively outgunned, by the opposing artillery of the BBC, Sky, ITV, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Sun, Telegraph, Daily Express, Guardian, Independent and so on, not to mention all of the bourgeois representatives in the labour movement itself, for whom these ideas mean something completely different to that which Paul seeks to assign to them. As Marx points out in relation to France in 1848, if we start by ourselves adopting the values and slogans of the reaction, we should not be surprised if those weapons are used immediately against us, and provide the battle-cry of the reaction. Family will inevitably be defined as the traditional nuclear family, and its extension as patriotism; Hard Work will inevitably be defined as “A Fair Day's Pay for a Fair Day's Work”, and hostility to all of the “scroungers” on benefits, who will also be equated with immigrants, with a not too difficult extension also to strikers, better paid workers with gold-plated pensions and so on; and decency will feed all of the homophobic and other bigotry, which survey after survey has shown correlates almost completely with those who also voted for Brexit.
Rather than fighting our class enemies on the basis of word games, on their territory, it is necessary to forge the weapons of our own armoury to fight that battle. The watchwords instead should be class, solidarity and internationalism.
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