The alliance, within a single party, of representatives of the workers and of the bourgeoisie, is the characteristic of social-democracy - that is of actual social-democracy as against the Marxists who, in Lenin's time, called themselves Social-Democrats. It reflects this petty-bourgeois notion of the shared interests of the two classes. But, it always means that the interests of the proletariat must be subordinated to the interests of the bourgeoisie. It has been the characteristic of Labourism from its inception, and that ideology now pervades all of the social-democratic parties, including those that began as socialist parties.
At first, it stems from the shared opposition to the old feudal ruling class, but it extends to the notion that the interests of the workers is furthered by the most rapid development of industrial capital, which increases employment and living standards. As Lenin describes above, and as Marx sets out in Wage Labour and Capital, and Value, Price and Profit, this interest of workers in the rapid development of capitalism, is not an illusion. What it fails to identify, however, is that this general upward development is itself contradictory in nature, as a result of the fundamentally antagonistic interests of capital and labour. In the twentieth century, it is extended to the idea of a shared opposition to threats to bourgeois-democracy from fascism, even though, in reality, when fascism actually poses a real threat, the bourgeoisie, itself, as opposed to its liberal political representatives, has already gone over to the fascists, in order to protect its interests.
In Britain, in the 19th century, the clear example of a popular front, within a social-democratic party, was the Liberal Party. It was the political representative of the large industrial capitalists, as against the Tory Party, which continued to be the representative of the old landed aristocracy and the associated financial oligarchy. The Tory Party, itself, however, was forced to recognise the material reality that the future of the state depended upon the development of large-scale industrial capital, and so was led to repeal the Corn Laws, having had to undergo a split in order to do so. But, the newly constituted Conservative Party, emerging from that split, continued to be, essentially, a Tory Party representing the interests of the landed aristocracy and financial oligarchy. The Tory/Conservative Party represented an alliance combining the political representatives of the bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy, whereas the Liberal Party represented a popular front combining the political representatives of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The most obvious manifestation of that was the support for the Liberals from the trades unions, and the existence of a number of Lib-Lab MP's. That is working-class MP's, supported by the trades unions, but who were elected on a Liberal ticket.
As Engels put it,
“The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest - bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc...
...these circumstances had turned the English working class, politically, into the tail of the ‘great Liberal Party’, the party led by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working class.”
(Preface To The Second German Edition of “The Condition Of The Working Class)
The further development of the labour movement made this arrangement, inside the Liberal Party, unsustainable. It was a party that was, openly, the party of the large industrial capitals that now dominated the economy, but which relied upon the votes of millions of working men, and their mobilisation by the trades unions. It was inevitable that the workers, and those trades unions, would demand the dominant say in the policy of any such party, and that was only possible by the creation of an independent workers' party. But, the Labour Party was created differently to the socialist parties in the rest of Europe, and across the globe. By coming out of the Liberal Party, and being the creation of the trades unions, it was born as a social-democratic party, of the same ilk as the Liberals, with the same social-democratic, i.e. bourgeois, ideology as the Liberal Party, and indeed as the trades unions themselves.
The trades unions' social function, as Marx describes in Value, Price and Profit, is merely to engage in distributional struggles, within the confines of capitalism. They seek to merely obtain a better price for labour-power, in the same way that the bosses seek to obtain better profits, and landowners seek higher rents, and money lenders higher rates of interest. It accepts the fundamental premise that capitalism is to continue, and that means that the limits to wages and conditions must always be subordinated to only that which enables capitalism to thrive. Lenin formulated this reality, by describing the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers' party. The Labour Party is born as a popular front. Its ideology is always a bourgeois ideology that starts from the premise that capitalism is eternal, and its interests must dominate in order that workers might obtain some additional scraps from the table. The only variation is the degree to which it is dominated by the outright political representatives of capital, or that they are softened by the presence of a greater number of bourgeois representatives of workers.
The socialist parties in Europe are also now social-democratic in nature, as with the Labour Party. When revolutionaries engage in “Entrism” into these parties, the tactic developed by Trotskyists in the 1930's, this is simply an acceptance of the fact that they are now a small minority, placed in the same position as Marx and Engels in 1848, of having to undertake such an undeclared popular front, in order to gain the ear of the working-class. Indeed, its for this reason that the revolutionaries can never take on the role of government, in any such party, and must at all times attempt to maintain their own political and organisational independence, even if this has to be done covertly. The whole point of the tactic is to be able to continue to present their own politics and programme to workers, in opposition to that of the social-democrats and reformist socialists, and to illustrate its significance, in practice, in the daily lives of those workers that still give their allegiance to these bourgeois and reformist parties. In this respect, they form a united front with those workers at the base.
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