In the past, demands have been raised, in Britain, and elsewhere, for the Labour Party or its foreign equivalents, to “Take The Power”. This slogan is wrong-headed for several reasons. Firstly, it confuses governmental office with state power. In 1917, the Bolsheviks could demand that the reformist and centrist parties throw out the capitalist ministers, and take the power, because the government itself was already based on the state power exercised by the workers and peasants soviets. As Lenin put it,
“For it must not be forgotten that actually, in Petrograd, the power is in the hands of the workers and soldiers; the new government is not using and cannot use violence against them, because there is no police, no army standing apart from the people, no officialdom standing all-powerful above the people. This is a fact, the kind of fact that is characteristic of a state of the Paris Commune type. This fact does not fit into the old schemes. One must know how to adapt schemes to facts, instead of reiterating the now meaningless words about a “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” in general.”
Even then, this was actually a condition of dual power, with sections of the state still in the hands of the bourgeoisie and of Tsarism, which became clear when the Provisional Government of Kerensky allied itself with Kornilov, who would, in turn, have overthrown the Provisional Government had his advance not been stopped by detachments of Bolshevik Red Guards, in August 1917. At no time, when this demand for “Labour Take The Power” has been raised, has any such condition of dual power existed in Britain, on which such a government could have rested.
But, it is wrong-headed for another reason, which is that the Mensheviks and the Left SR's, in 1917, were reformist and centrist parties, but they were workers' parties committed, albeit confusedly, to advancing towards socialism. The Labour Party is not. It is a bourgeois party, albeit a bourgeois workers' party. Some of its members are socialists, some even revolutionary socialists, but, particularly within its parliamentary representation, and bureaucratic apparatus, it is an outright bourgeois party, which openly represents the interests of capital.
In order, even in a condition of dual power, for the slogan “Labour Take The Power”, to mean anything equivalent to the demand for a Workers Government, the Labour Party would have had to be almost unrecognisably transformed, and it would have to split, prior to any such government being formed. Any such split would have to be the equivalent of a demand within it of “Down With the Capitalist Ministers”. If we compare the current Parliamentary Labour Party with the Provisional Government of 1917, at best, a handful of its members would be comparable even with the Mensheviks. The Shadow Cabinet, almost in its entirety, are the equivalents of the Cadets or other bourgeois parties, and that applies for the vast majority of its back bench MP's too. There is no way, even in conditions of dual power, that such a party could ever constitute the basis of a Workers Government.
As a bourgeois workers' party, the Labour Party is already, in its composition, a popular front comprising representatives of capital and labour. At best the representatives of labour are reformists, whose defence of labour is constrained within the bounds of what is compatible with the requirements of capital, at any specific time, i.e. consistent with their essentially trades union consciousness, out of which the party was originally formed. The balance of representation between these two wings of the party fluctuates, itself largely dependent upon changes in the underlying economy. In essence, this fluctuation means only a predominance of either conservative or progressive social-democratic ideas.
Social-democracy is the dominant ideology of the ruling class, and its state, in the era of large-scale, socialised, industrial capital, and imperialism. Demanding that any of these social-democratic parties, therefore, “Take The Power”, is only a demand for them to assert the interests of large-scale socialised capital. Whilst that would be progressive compared to the conservative governments based upon the petty-bourgeoisie, it is hardly what was in the mind of the revolutionaries in formulating the concept of the Workers' Government.
If, on the other hand, some confluence of circumstance had changed the nature of one of these parties, as might have happened had Corbyn and his followers pushed through a democratisation of Labour, and a large scale deselection of its pro-capitalist MPs, then any such government that sought to make serious inroads on the power of the ruling class, without being based on a large scale mobilisation of workers outside parliament, creating a condition of dual power, would undoubtedly suffer the fate of Allende's government in Chile in 1973.
The Workers' Government, as a transitional demand, and not as simply a lazy form of words to mean nothing more than a left reformist, social-democratic government, is only applicable in conditions of dual power. It is essentially an extension of the tactic of the United Front, which enables the revolutionaries to appeal to the reformist and centrist workers, and to strip them of their continued faith in the reformist and centrist politicians, by demanding that those politicians take action in the interests of workers, and against the interests of capital, but enables the revolutionaries to retain their own political and organisational independence.
“Is the creation of such a government by the traditional workers’ organizations possible? Past experience shows, as has already been stated, that this is, to say the least, highly improbable. However, one cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the petty bourgeois parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie. In any case one thing is not to be doubted: even if this highly improbable variant somewhere at some time becomes a reality and the “workers’ and farmers’ government” in the above-mentioned sense is established in fact, it would represent merely a short episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat.”
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