The Idiocy of Left Brexitism and Its Twin - Part 12 of 15

The similarity, here, of the position of the Narodniks and today's petty-bourgeois Brexiters/Lexiters, and their equivalents in other countries is obvious.

On the basis of these comparisons, therefore, Lenin says, its apparent that it is the Marxists, not the Narodniks, who are the inheritors of the liberal heritage of the 1860's. Such a claim would, of course, be seen as heresy and damning, in itself, by Comrade Douglass, and other Left Brexiters.

“As far from renouncing the heritage, they consider it one of their principal duties to refute the romantic and petty-bourgeois fears which induce the Narodniks on very many and very important points to reject the European ideals of the enlighteners. But it goes without saying that the “disciples” do not guard the heritage in the way an archivist guards an old document. Guarding the heritage does not mean confining oneself to the heritage, and the ‘disciples” add to their defence of the general ideals of Europeanism an analysis of the contradictions implicit in our capitalist development, and an assessment of this development from the specific standpoint indicated above.”

Lenin spells it out more clearly in relation to the development of capitalism in Russia, but the same argument applies to the development of capital on an international/EU scale.

“One can “greet” the capitalism developing in Russia only in two ways: one can regard it either as progressive, or as retrogressive; either as a step forward on the right road, or as a deviation from the true path; one can assess it either from the standpoint of the class of small producers which capitalism destroys, or from the standpoint of the class of propertyless producers which capitalism creates. There is no middle way.”

The development of first the EEC, and, subsequently, the EU was such a similar development. Indeed, Lenin and Trotsky saw it that way, too, even at the start of the last century. They supported the idea of the formation of a United States of Europe, and the implications of that, were also set out by Trotsky, in The Program of Peace. Its not that we see a United States of Europe, still less the current EU, as in any way a sufficient development. On the contrary, as Lenin says above, we cannot confine ourselves “to these people’s ideals”, but the “ideal” of the EU, of a United States of Europe, is a higher stage of development from which to pursue our own proletarian ideals, of the end of national borders, and nation states, for the self-determination of the working-class and so on.

We do not confine ourselves to the limited bourgeois ideals of the EU, or even a United States of Europe, but as against the petty-bourgeois, Narodnik, Anarchist, Brexitism we “therefore strive to support, accelerate, facilitate development along the present path, to remove all obstacles which hamper this development and retard it.”

The reality is, as seen on numerous occasions, although the ideological representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry, i.e. the Stalinists, centrists and anarchists, proclaim their hostility to the bourgeoisie, in the end, they always fail to break with them. The epitome of that is the Popular Front. It was seen in the Provisional Government in Russia, in 1917, when Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, as well as the Mensheviks and S.R's sought to support the government of Kerensky, as against Lenin's demand of “Down With The Capitalist Ministers” and so on. It was seen in the position of the Stalinists and Mensheviks in relation to the Chinese Revolution, and again in the Spanish Revolution. As Trotsky put it,

“From April to September 1917, the Bolsheviks demanded that the SRs and Mensheviks break with the liberal bourgeoisie and take power into their own hands. Under this provision the Bolshevik Party promised the Mensheviks and the SRs, as the petty bourgeois representatives of the worker and peasants, its revolutionary aid against the bourgeoisie categorically refusing, however, either to enter into the government of the Mensheviks and SRs or to carry political responsibility for it. If the Mensheviks and SRs had actually broke with the Cadets (liberals) and with foreign imperialism, then the “workers’ and peasants’ government” created by them could only have hastened and facilitated the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But it was exactly because of this that the leadership of petty bourgeois democracy resisted with all possible strength the establishment of its own government. 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.”

(The Transitional Programme)

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