John McDonnell For Deputy Leader

 If the Labour Left in parliament has any residual purpose, and if the trades unions have any desire to stop the continuing disaster that is Starmer's Blue Labour, and its impending descent into oblivion, they should ensure that John McDonnell stands for Deputy Labour Leader, and that he wins that election.

It would be the biggest message to Starmer and the reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalists around him that their time is up.  Reform cannot be beaten by appeasing it, and adopting its clothes, but only by confronting its racist lies and bigotry, and presenting an attractive, socialist alternative.  That alternative involves not just the kind of mildly progressive, social-democratic agenda that seems to be being offered by the Corbyn Party, but the potential to move beyond it, including an internationalist position offering a rapid re-joining of the EU, as part of the fight for a socialist Europe.

In place of Starmer's affinity with national flags, we should offer the red flag of socialism.

Responding To The Racists Tactics On Refugee Hotels

The racists of Reform, with their extra-parliamentary auxiliaries from the various neo-fascist organisations have targeted the hotels where the government has located asylum seekers who have escaped various hell-holes across the globe. Many of those hell-holes are the product of past British colonialism, as well as more recent British-US military adventures, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Indeed, many of them are people who collaborated with British and US invading forces in those countries, and whose position was made impossible when British and US forces scuttled.

The tactic was designed to create a hostile environment, and whip up racist hysteria along the lines of what happened in 2024, and has been facilitated by the same sensationalist media that whipped up those same forces to vote for Brexit in 2016, which has also created such chaos and economic disaster that the racists of Reform try to blame on migrants.

In relation to those “migrants”, the racists always refer to them as “illegal” migrants, but there is nothing illegal about them. Those being housed in these run down hotels, many of which would have simply closed were it not for being put to this use, are refugees and asylum seekers. That is a perfectly legal status. Just look at all the old films from the Cold War era, where people escaped Eastern Europe by various means to sneak into Western Europe, and claim asylum.

The reason the government has had to resort to more of these run down hotels to put asylum seekers in is that the previous Tory government stopped processing the applications for asylum, as well as the fact that a growing austerity, since 2010, means that the state bureaucracy, in general, does not have the resources required to function. Indeed, the same austerity measures, introduced following the bailing out of the financial speculators, who lost paper wealth in the global crash of 2008, that means asylum claims do not get processed effectively is, also, the same reason that schools, hospitals, roads and other vital services have been run down, but which the racists, now, seek to blame on “migrants”.

Of course, the Tories who implemented that austerity over the last 15 years, were also the same ones that inflicted Brexit on the country, which has cost it around £40 billion a year in lost taxes as a result of the 4% reduction in GDP caused by the loss of trade with the EU as Britain's largest trading partner. That £40 billion a year would go a long way to financing many of those services that the racists that backed Brexit, now seek to blame on migrants. With the vast majority of people now seeing that they were lied to over Brexit, and now wanting to re-join the EU, the Tories in their old form have been destroyed, reduced to their central core of racists, which has emerged from its chrysalis form into the shape of Reform. They can only relate to that racist hardcore, and the more Reform grows, on that basis, the more the Tories, left in the old Conservative Party are squeezed out of existence.

Hence the attempts of the Tories to respond by making themselves appear even more hardline racists than Reform. That, of course, simply drives the Conservative element of the Tory party further into the hands of the Liberals, where many of them had found a natural home following Brexit. The Conservative Party can no more compete with Reform on that ground than can the petty-bourgeois nationalists and racists of Starmer's Blue Labour, because the hardcore racists will not believe them, and those who are gulled by the lies of the racists will always vote for the original rather than some pale imitation of it. The only thing that trying to out Reform Reform will bring for Blue Labour and the Tories is a further collapse of their own core vote as it surges towrds the Liberals, Greens, Plaid, SNP, and Your Party.

That is already apparent. At the last local elections, it became obvious that the Tory vote had simply moved en masse to Reform, whilst much of its Conservative voter base switched to the Liberals, or Greens. The claim of Reform, put to Tory voters, that a vote for the Tories was a vote for Starmer was not only vindicated but heeded by Tory voters. In 2024, Starmer's Blue Labour only managed to sustain the meagre vote it managed, by similarly claiming that a vote for more progressive parties, such as the Liberals, Greens or various independents, would be a vote for the Tories. That clearly was not true. Not only did the Liberals win large numbers of additional seats, and would have won more had their been proportional representation, but the Greens also won more seats, and, again would have won many more had their been proportional representation. Even independent candidates, such as Corbyn, won their seats, such is the extent of the distaste for Starmer's reactionary nationalist Blue Labour, and that has intensified since then.

In a number of local by-elections, Labour has lost not to Reform, but to Green candidates standing on platforms, at least on paper, to the left of Blue Labour. 

That, also, gives the lie to the Left nationalists who purvey the myth that Labour has lost support to Reform, and so needs to accommodate that reactionary agenda. If Your Party were to allow itself to be sent down that dead-end, it would quickly destroy itself. Your Party can only provide a real alternative to Blue Labour if it stands on a progressive, internationalist and socialist platform. Having nearly a million people already having signed up to it, gives it an unprecedented advantage in starting out on that basis. It must suck up all of the progressive support for the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and SNP on that basis, again, not by accommodating itself to their liberal, bourgeois agenda, but by offering a clear and principled socialist alternative.

The ideas of calling Your Party “The People's Party”, and such like, are an abysmal, popular frontist betrayal. A true alternative to Blue Labour can never be formed on the basis of such populist nonsense. The “people”, after all, also includes the 30% of the population who are petty-bourgeois, the same social forces that formed the hard core of the Tory Party, and worse, the same kinds of social layers that have always provided the foot soldiers of fascism. They are the same social forces that look to the ideas of Faragism, Trussism and so on, because their inefficient small businesses cannot function without scrapping all of the social protections that have been hard won over the last century. Nothing sustainable can come from trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and seeking to accommodate and appease the reactionary interests and ideas of that section of society.

One suggestion that follows that same line of thinking was to call it the "New Party", with all of the Mosleyite connotations that has!  Mosley himself of course created the New Party as a supposedly "Left" alternative to Labour after he resigned as a Labour Minister.  All of the claims that it should appeal to reactionary elements by following the example of Blue Labour in brandishing its "Britishness" and patriotism are also disastrous.  I would favour the opposite, proclaiming its internationalism, and specifically the thing that won over tens of thousands to Corbyn's Labour Party, in 2015, its opposition to Brexit and Europeanism.  On that basis, I would favour either the International Labour Party, or the European Workers' Party.

In the coming months, it will become apparent that Starmer's refuge in 2024, will, now, turn against him. Everywhere, Blue Labour is losing, and it is losing because progressive voters are abandoning it to vote for other parties such as the Liberals, Greens and so on. That is even before Your Party is actually formed, and begins fighting elections. As with Blair's New Labour, which was an empty vessel, and lost all of its activists on the ground, Blue Labour, also, has no large activist base, working in local communities, campaigns, and workplaces. Your Party, especially if the trades unions give up on Starmer and affiliate to it, will have that implantation in the working-class, much as happened when the trades unions created the Labour Party itself, as they split from the Liberals. It will quickly become apparent that a vote for Blue Labour, as against a vote for Your Party, or in some seats, the Greens or Liberals, or Plaid or SNP, will be a vote for Reform. To avoid splitting the anti-Reform vote, it will be necessary for the remaining Labour voters to switch to these other progressive alternatives.

The latest polls show that Your Party is already set to overtake and replace Blue Labour as the main workers' party.

Blue Labour has been sucked down the rabbit hole of reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism. It may still be possible to save it, but only if the trades unions act, in the next few weeks, to oust Starmer, and set it on a different track. As a start, they should be demanding that instead of Blue Labour responding to the racist attacks on refugees and migrants, by adopting an even more reactionary and racist stance itself, that it begins to stand up to the racists. Part of the problem was the fact that the Tories stopped processing asylum claims, and its now been revealed that Jenrick had himself signed up a load of these run down hotels to house them, before the Tories lost the election in 2024. The simple answer to the tactic of taking legal action by racist councils is for the government to simply give a blanket approval of asylum to everyone currently seeking it. That would mean that all of those asylum seekers would be able to take up employment, and find their own accommodation, as well as contributing to the production of goods and services, and paying taxes etc. It would immediately remove all of the objections put forward by the racists.

Not Advocating Rejoin Is Unrealistic

Keir Starmer, despite 70% of Labour voters, and 80% of Labour members wanting to scrap Brexit and re-join the EU, not only refuses to commit to it, but even refuses to propose re-joining the Single Market. He continues to propose the ridiculous cakeist concept of a Labour Brexit, in which he will negotiate a better deal for Britain with the EU than it had as a member, or that other EU member states have. Sheer fantasy, and jingoist, British exceptionalism. The Liberals, who should be harvesting Labour votes, if not also Labour members, by the bucketful, in those conditions, have also adopted a tailist, cowardly approach, in which they continue to murmur about rejoining the EU at some future point, but claiming that its unrealistic right now. Quite the opposite, its unrealistic not to put rejoin on the agenda, to be pursued immediately by the next government.

Unrealistic for all the reasons previously set out, in relation to the fantasy of Britain somehow negotiating a closer deal with the EU. What does a closer deal mean? Britain is already bound to have to abide by EU Single market rules and regulations, if it wants to export goods and services into the EU, its closest, and by far largest market for those goods and services. As I wrote recently, Starmer's comment about not wanting to diverge from those rules and regulations is meaningless, because, as the Brexitories of Johnson's government and Truss's government soon found out, Britain can't diverge from them, whether it wants to or not, and still trade with the EU.

Britain can have a closer arrangement, in so far as re-joining some of the EU's institutions such as with the Horizon programme, but, again, all that means is a recognition of reality that Britain is massively damaged, by not being inside those programmes and institutions. It has already abandoned some of its own national programmes, set up as alternatives, and, as with its global health insurance card, set up as an alternative to the EHIC, they are useless, because no one, in other countries, recognises it, or accepts it. These all amount to costly, useless, bureaucratic national duplications of programmes and institutions that Britain, inside the EU, had automatic access to. So, if Britain is basically bound by the rules and regulation of the Single Market, and is having to seek membership of these other EU institutions and programmes, it is not demanding rejoining the EU itself that is unrealistic!

The only thing that Starmer can point to is the requirement to commit to free movement of labour, as a condition of membership of the Single Market, but for workers, for the vast majority of Labour, and most Liberal and Green voters, free movement is something we desperately want back, not something to be feared. Starmer and the Liberals hack at the racism of the Tories immigration policies and attitudes, but, at base, the reason that Starmer, and, it appears, the Liberal leadership baulk at proposing rejoin is that they are pandering to those same racist sentiments amongst a section of reactionary voters.

In the 1990's, as the Tories were torn apart by the divisions between their reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist/Eurosceptic wing, and their conservative social-democratic wing, what strengthened the position of the former, besides the fact of the growing social weight of the petty-bourgeoisie, was that it was also able to take political shape in the form of UKIP. UKIP was never going to win any significant number of parliamentary seats, let alone form a government, its electoral successes, as with the BNP, during that period, were confined to the fact that a fanatical core of voters, had an exaggerated effect on the results, in small polls, such as those for local councils, and for the European Parliament. But, what it did do was to act as a whip on the Tory Party. It knew that an increasing number of its core vote could find an alternative, enough to prevent the Tories being able to form secure majorities. Something similar happened in the US, and elsewhere.

What Starmer, and, it appears, the Liberal leadership are relying on is that there is no equivalent to their internationalist Left, providing an equivalent whip. In the 2019, local and Euro elections, it was clear that the Liberals, Greens and others performed that function, in relation to a Labour Party that was drifting towards its own Brexit position, under Corbyn's leadership. Even 60% of Labour members, voted for these other anti-Brexit parties, in those elections, let alone Labour voters. It set in the rot that led to Labour's defeat at the 2019 General Election. But, the position of Starmer, and of the Liberal leadership, seems to be that those voters, desperate to ditch the Tories, will hold their nose and vote Labour or Liberal, for that purpose, despite the fact that they are basically adapting to and appeasing that increasingly small minority of racists and bigots that continue to support Brexit, despite the obvious disaster it has turned out to be. The field would appear to be open to some progressive, pro-EU party that would put the question of immediately rejoining the EU on the agenda.

Resolutions are put on the agenda for Labour's conference tentatively calling for a commitment to rejoining the Single Market, and so on, but Starmer's increasingly police state apparatus in the party, with the use of former MI6 spies, and so on, to sniff out and eradicate even the potential for having to deal with awkward questions, let alone a conference debate, is likely to prevent it getting to the conference floor. Liberal activists also raised the question on the conference floor, but with no great effect. So far, the Greens have also failed to make hay amidst all of this cowardice, and tailism by Labour and the Liberals, to stand up and be counted, and commit to rejoining the EU at the earliest opportunity. So, far, the real action has come from small groups of progressive, internationalist individuals, such as those that organised the Rejoin March, last Saturday, that drew in thousands of supporters, despite the fact that the British mainstream media have done everything possible to avoid even reporting on its existence. Some will also gather at Labour Conference, in Liverpool, organised by Labour Social.

The problem with much of the discussion about Brexit, and re-joining is that it continues to be framed within the nationalistic agenda. It starts from the question about whether Brexit has been good or bad for “Britain”. But the concept Britain, just as with the concept “Ukraine”, is entirely abstract, and misses the fact that nations are comprised of classes with different class interests. Nationalism, and the idea that there is some overriding “national interest”, is the ideology of the bourgeoisie, because, of course, what this “national interest”, really means, in practice, is the interests of the nation state as the state of the ruling class! Suppose that Brexit was in the interests of “Britain”, i.e. of the British ruling class – it isn't, but just suppose – would that mean that international socialists would, then, not have to oppose it? Of course not.

Brexit, of course, was thought to be in the interests of a considerable portion of the British population, the 15 million or so voters of the petty-bourgeoisie, the self-employed, small shopkeepers and so on, for whom any chance to avoid the greater competition of large-scale capital, the requirement to abide by civilised standards for workers, consumers and the environment are simply obstacles in the way of them making their profits. Many of them, still, no doubt, think the same way still, which explains the reservoir of support for those ideas, still, in the Tory Party. But, the fact is that even if Brexit were not the disaster, economically and in other ways, for Britain, and particularly for its workers that it is, international socialists would still oppose it. To take an extreme, example, suppose “Britain” could regain its former imperial glory, and re-establish dominion over large parts of the globe, obtaining protected markets for its goods and services, and cheap sources of food and materials. Such a Britain might, then, even pass on some of this largesse to its workers. Would socialists, then, be in favour of such colonialism, or fail to oppose it? Of course not.

As socialists, our main concern is not whether Brexit is good or bad for “Britain”, or even for “British” workers, but whether it is an impediment to, or facilitator of, socialism itself. The Stalinists and social-democrats continue to view it in national terms, because their vision of Socialism itself is national, i.e. national socialism, often to be handed to workers from on high by the state, despite the fact its a capitalist state. Brexit has been a disaster for the “British” economy, and for “British” workers, but that is not why socialists oppose it, and seek to reverse it at the earliest opportunity. The reason is that it acts to divide workers in Britain from their comrades across the EU; it acts to constrain their ability to fight as a class for their interests, as a whole, and without that ability, they will, ultimately fail.

The question of whether British workers might obtain more or less scraps from the table of British capitalists, as a result of Brexit or some other such decision is irrelevant, just as with the question of whether they might be better or worse off as a result of the victory or defeat of their own ruling class and state in a war with some other state. In the end, all of these amount to fobbing off workers with sops, whilst the fundamental basis of their problems – capitalism – remains, and is, indeed, strengthened, against them, because they have failed to demarcate and pursue their own class interests as against those of their own ruling class. At times, workers are able, like, now, with the existence of labour shortages, to raise their wages, but, that only leads to the ruling class introducing labour-saving machines, causing unemployment to rise, so that they can reduce wages once more, and so boost their profits. The victory of one capitalist state, in a war, might enable it to appease its own workers at the expense of the workers of the defeating capitalist state, but the nature of capitalism, means that, the ensuing peace will be only a temporary interlude until the next war.

For workers, the only sustainable future is to overthrow capitalism and build Socialism, but Socialism can only be built on an international basis. The starting point of that is to smash down the national borders between nation states, so that workers can begin to struggle, as a global class for their joint interests. The EU, whilst by no means what socialists would advocate, as it stands, is, at least, a starting point for such a struggle, the first step on that journey. Its why Socialists must demand,

 Rejoin The EU Now, Build A Workers' Europe.

The Dialectics of Delusion

Paul Mason, in his latest newsletter, argues that the Euro2020 Final, and its aftermath, represented a dialectical turning point. This is the dialectics of delusion.

Paul's argument is that the England football team had come to represent a series of progressive ideas and cultural values, symbolised by the multiracial nature of the team, the taking of the knee, as a statement against racism, and so on. The government, and its racist supporters had set itself against the team, precisely because of it acting as a symbol of these “woke” ideas, and values, even going so far as to brand it “Marxist”. The argument goes that by rallying “the nation” behind the England team, and the flag, a victory for this England team would be victory for all those progressive values it represented, and a defeat for the government, and all of the reactionary values it represents.

Although England did not, in fact, win, just getting into the final was enough, Paul now argues, to make this point, and the fact that the government was led to denounce all of the racist abuse that was unleashed, following the defeat, represents the dialectical turning point at which those reactionary cultural values and ideas are defeated, creating the conditions for forward movement. This argument is nonsense on stilts, clothed in elaborate, but ill-fitting, philosophical garb.

If Paul's philosophical framework were that of Hegel it would be bad enough, but its not even that. Marx and Engels described Hegel's idealist dialectic as standing on its head, in need of being set right way up. Hegel's dialectic is idealist, because it begins with the ideas in Men's heads, the values they adhere to. For Hegel, every idea contains within itself the germ of a new idea. The process of thought led to the revelation and growth of this new idea until it becomes the basis of the ideas and values in Men's heads. As these ideas develop, by this process, which Hegel saw as being the function of philosophers, so these ideas become the driving force for change in society, a function which Hegel saw as devolving upon the state. Its easy to see why elitists, statists and authoritarians like this concept.

Marx and Engels say this is upside down, because the ideas in Men's heads do not simply appear from nowhere. Even allowing for a process of thought based upon abstraction, its necessary to have a starting point, and something to abstract from. The idea of developing tools did not just pop into Men's heads, but required the existence of natural tools, even if just the human hand itself, or a stone, a stick and so on. The development of tools, as a means of raising labour productivity is itself driven by a natural law that of The Law of Value, which dictates that to increase wealth/use values, with any given amount of available labour, it is necessary to increase productivity, so that the individual value of each use value is reduced.

This process, continually driving towards higher productivity, goes on behind the back of society. It not only leads to the development of tools, but also to the social division of labour, to the development of settled agriculture, which is the basis of the creation of a social surplus, which enables industrial production to be separated from agriculture, as well as the creation of private property, the family and the state. It is thus changes in the material world, arising from changes going on automatically, driven by The Law of Value, much as the law of natural selection drives biological evolution, that leads to the ideas in Men's heads changing as they reflect these changes in the material world. As Marx puts it,

“Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.

Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.

There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement – mors immortalis.”

(The Poverty of Philosophy)

But, at least Hegel understood the dialectical process of development. Paul's version of the dialectic is closer to the garbled, half-understood version of Proudhon. As Marx described, during his exile in Paris, he spent many nights trying to explain the dialectic to Proudhon, but without success. Hegel at least understood that the process was one of development, of something new arising out of it. In that sense, it was revolutionary. But, Proudhon's version of the dialectic was, rather, one in which, instead of something new and revolutionary arising, the aim was simply to conserve what already existed, but shed of its unfortunate aspects. It was the same approach as taken by Sismondi, Malthus, Duhring and the Narodniks.

When it comes to trying to conserve the existing relations, ideas quickly move from being simply conservative to being reactionary. When material conditions have already changed, the ideas that developed upon those previous conditions are no longer consonant with reality, and become reactionary. It amounts to trying to turn the clock backwards.

So, for example, in the 18th/19th century, material development led to more rapid development of capitalism. Capitalist development originates in industrial production, in the towns. As this capitalist production increases, so it requires changed conditions in the form of larger single markets, standardisation of laws, and so on, and this leads to a need to go beyond the parochialism and provincialism of feudalism, to the creation of nation states as the basic politico-economic unit. Under these conditions, defence of parochialism and provincialism is reactionary, and nationalism became progressive. But, its progressive nature was purely a function of it playing this role of being the necessary form required for the rapid development of capitalism, at that time. The idea that nationalism, separated from those specific, objective, historical conditions, could be progressive is nonsense. It is idealist and subjectivist, reducing the categories progressive and reactionary to nothing more than the moral epithets good and bad. As Marx points out, slavery, under certain historical conditions, was progressive. It was the basis of the first class societies, and their development of the productive forces and science, upon which all subsequent development was founded.

“Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.

Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

(ibid)

But, nothing in that requires us to describe slavery as “good”. That was the approach of Proudhon, for whom the dialectic amounted only to taking some phenomena and trying to conserve it by removing its bad elements whilst leaving the good.

“What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.”

(ibid)

And, this is Paul's approach to the dialectic and nationalism. He wants to conserve nationalism, and its symbolisation by the flag, because he thinks that large sections of the working-class are inseparable from it, by stripping it of its bad side, whilst promoting a good side, by identifying it with new progressive cultural values, such as those identified with the England team. A similar mistake was made by the Stalinists and Socialists in Germany in the 1930's, who, for similar reasons, tried to present themselves as better nationalists than the Nazis. The result was rather that they legitimised the nationalism of the Nazis, whilst being seen as pale imitations of the real thing by those they sought to win over.

What Paul proposes is an impossibility. It is idealist and utopian, and as with all utopian schemes that seek to save the ideas whose time has past, as a result of changed material conditions, it is, thereby, reactionary, which is not at all to say that Paul himself is a reactionary, any more than was Sismondi or Proudhon. Far from it.

Nationalism long since ceased being a progressive idea, for the simple reason that the nation state long ago ceased being the appropriate politico-economic unit for capitalist development, let alone socialism. The US came into existence as a federation of individual states, as did Canada, Australia and so on. As Engels pointed out, the Federal nature of the US was already acting as a fetter on further development, even in the 19th century. The Civil War was fought to undermine the continued power of the states, and to enforce the power of the centralised federal state over them.

The rapid development of the productive forces, by industrial capital, meant that, by the end of the 19th century, capital was bursting out of its nation state integument. European capital needed a European state to put it on a competitive footing with the US, hence the two European wars of 1914-18, and 1939-45. As capital became even larger, and took the form of the giant multinational corporation, it becomes obvious that the nation state was doomed, a relic of capitalism's infancy. Its seen not only in the creation of the EU, but all the other multinational politico-economic blocs created across the global economy.

In the Weekly Worker, Paul Demarty argues that even today, nationalism can be progressive in some conditions. He cites Cuba where, he argues, its revolution was driven by a desire to remove the US boot from its neck. But, that nationalism is what is used by the Stalinist regime to continue to oppress Cuban workers, in the same way that Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, China, Korea and Vietnam did. Nationalism was the fundamental basis of the concept of Socialism In One Country, as against the idea of socialist internationalism and Permanent Revolution. It attempts to keep workers hermetically sealed away from their comrades in other countries, locked behind Berlin Walls, and Bamboo Curtains.

Even in the 1920's, when the Comintern developed its Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, it did not advocate such struggles on the basis of nationalism, but of International Socialism, and Permanent Revolution. The suggestion to the contrary is purely a confection of Stalinsm, Third Worldism and petty-bourgeois “anti-imperialism”.

Paul Mason, in some of his previous writings, has talked about “progressive nationalism”, in relation to Scotland. But, there is nothing progressive about the nationalism of the SNP, and all of those elements of the Left, in Scotland, that clung to the coat-tails of the SNP, during the referendum, whilst trying to proclaim their independence from it, have disappeared, much as the Lexiters have ceased any independent existence following Brexit, and in the worst cases, have been sucked into the red-brown Front of Galloway's WPB, or the ludicrous NIP.

What exactly does the turning point that Paul sees as significant amount to? What he offers is a form of lesser-evilism. A great deal of weight is placed upon the fact that the government and its supporters' attack on “wokism” had been turned back. For that to be significant requires that “wokism” itself be considered something more fundamental than being just liberal gesture politics. If we take the symbol around which the government focused its attack, taking the knee, it was itself the mildest of all possible gestures against what is, in contrast, a most pernicious aspect of society, in terms of overt discrimination and oppression of a section of society on the basis of ethnicity.

Of course, socialists support such gestures, just as we supported the clenched fist, black-power salute of athletes in the 1960's, but in doing so, we also have to make clear that such gestures do not change anything fundamentally. Only actual changes in society can do that, and those changes do not arise simply on the basis of the ideas in people's heads changing. But, did the ideas in people's heads, even, change here? No, they didn't. It has never been the case that mainstream politicians, or the Tory media have openly argued in favour of racist violence or abuse. That Johnson and Co., The Daily Mail and so on have condemned those racists that abused England's black players does not represent any change of position for them. The Daily Mail, the most racist paper in Britain, for example, also fronted a years long campaign to bring the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence to book.

The proportion of hard core racists, in Britain, is small, and for those that seek to base themselves on the much larger proportion of soft racists, nationalists and xenophobes - pretty much the 30% plus of the population that also backed Brexit – these hard core racists are an embarrassment. There is nothing that has happened, in the last week, that has changed that. Paul's argument amounts to claiming a victory in the fact that the Tories did not commit political suicide by failing to oppose the hardcore racists, and the overt racist abuse! Its like Starmer's ridiculous attempts to claim the election win in Batley as some great triumph.

Whose views were changed in all this? Not the hardcore racists, who used the defeat as an opportunity to attack the black players; not the government or the racist media; not the soft racists and bigots for whom nationalism and xenophobia are necessarily linked. Even at the start of the final, there was widespread booing of the Italian Anthem, so whatever cultural change the team might be thought to have brought about, it certainly wasn't manifest amongst this section of society most closely associated with it!

And, again, this illustrates the element of lesser-evilism in Paul's argument, which basically trades off a defence of nationalism against overt racism. It basically says, in order to oppose overt racism against black British citizens, we need to unite all British citizens, black or white, under the flag, the same flag that was responsible for enslaving millions across the world. The trade-off minimises the manifestation of that reactionary nationalism, as it tries to pretend, as the populists do, that citizens can be united, on a progressive basis under the banner of nationalism. The trade-off is the potential undermining of the most overt racism against British citizens, against the promotion of a far more widespread xenophobia against the citizens of other nations, resulting from a conscious promotion of nationalism and patriotism, which, in the case of England, has been inseparable from its own claims of exceptionalism, superiority and oppression of others.

And, the problem is that, even in these pretty minimal and miserable terms, it cannot succeed.  The problem with Paul's approach is that of all Popular Fronts.  As Lenin noted, in his critique of the Russian Populists, the Narodniks, in the 1890's, it is only possible to talk about "the people", as a mass, in conditions where that people have not already been differentiated into bourgeois and proletarians.  Then the conditions of the peasant masses, and small producers was pretty homogeneous, and they could share a common hostility to feudalism/Tsarism.  But, as soon, as generalised commodity production begins to create a differentiation of this mass, it leads to the development of a bourgeoisie and proletariat, with a large petty-bourgeois mass in between, itself divided into multiple gradations and divisions, as its process of differentiation and disintegration continues.  Any attempt to talk about "the people", or "the nation", is then a reactionary delusion, because it ignores these actual material divisions and antagonistic interests.  Attempts to force different social elements into such a framework, therefore, is bound to fail, and to begin with, it means that the progressive elements within it, based upon the working-class, always have to subordinate their interests to those of the conservative elements within based upon the bourgeoisie, and liberal petty-bourgeoisie.  They have to do so, because were any such alliance attempt to put forward the actual solutions required to deal with the problems they confront, that liberal bourgeoisie would immediately detach from it!

In many ways, the epitome of the approach is Pritti Patel! Here she is an Asian woman, wrapped in the flag, in fact, more closely associated with the English Flag than the Union Flag. She was a spearhead of that symbol of nationalism – Brexit – that those like Paul, and Blue Labour now want to embrace, in their search for a progressive patriotism. And, Patel is also a champion of that other totem of the nationalists and patriots, a strict immigration and border policy, the corollary and part justification for Brexit itself. Indeed, those that want to promote a “progressive patriotism” will have to also promote that same strict immigration and border policy to be consistent, though they will try to disguise it with all the weasel words about “fairness”, and “non-racist immigration controls” and other such nonsense.

In other words, Patel, to pass as a honorary, white English nationalist, not only had to wrap herself in the flag, but also champion all those aspects of nationalism that are the antithesis of those progressive values that Paul sees as being promoted by the English team. Its why, no matter how well that team had done, it would not change the view of all those soft racists, bigots and nationalists – any more than has done the repeated success of Lewis Hamilton on the race track – that voted for Brexit, for Johnson, and who Paul, and the proponents of Blue Labour are seeking to win over. Even then, no matter how Brexitty how nationalistic, how racist Patel herself was, it didn't prevent her being the subject of racist abuse, any less than that directed at Lewis Hamilton, or the England Team's black players. Thinking that it would is to confuse the racism and xenophobia of bigots with rationality. Bigotry, by definition is based on a rejection of rationality.

And, that should be no surprise, because all surveys have shown an extremely high correlation between those that voted for Brexit and those that hold reactionary, bigoted views in general. In effect, they are the same group of people. That does not mean that this group is itself homogeneous. It includes white bigots who want to stop all immigration, as well as Asian bigots, some of whom want to pull up the drawbridge behind them, and others who wanted out of the EU, and its minimum rights, the better to increase the immigration from the sub-Continent of cheap imported labour, with few rights, the better to exploit it in their small businesses and sweat shops.

These contradictions amongst the petty-bourgeoisie are always what prevents it developing a coherent class consciousness, and becoming ruling class. Its what inevitably results in its blowing up, and those fascistic parties that base themselves upon it, blowing up along with it.  Rather than pandering to the same cross-class and contradictory concepts of nation, and nationalism, socialists must offer real solutions based upon the recognition of those class antagonisms, and our closer affinity with foreign workers than pour own bourgeoisie.  Our alternative must be based upon internationalism, class struggle, solidarity.  Against the illusory, reactionary appeals to unite under the national flag, our alternative is to unite under the red flag of international socialism, and the call for Workers of the World to Unite!

Democrats Should Impeach Republican Judges

If, as seems now likely, the Democrats win the Presidency, an control of the Senate, they should put in place the machinery to impeach all of the Republican appointed Supreme Court judges, who could stand in the way of any progressive legislation by the Executive.  The Republicans have pushed through the Senate the appointment of Trump's nomination, Amy Cony Barrett, at the last minute, in an obvious attempt to be able to frustrate any Democrat legislation, and in order to attempt to overturn much of the progressive legislation and court decisions of the last 60 years.  That is just a part of the reactionary, petty-bourgeois counter-revolution they have been undertaking, in the same way that a similar counter-revolution has been undertaken by the petty-bourgeoisie in Britain, in the form of Brexit.

That Supreme Court judges should be able to frustrate the wishes of the population, via their elected representatives decisions, is itself clearly an affront to democracy, that those judges are political appointments for life is an even greater insult.  The Republicans moves to get Barrett's appointment ratified at this stage, is clearly a political manoeuvre, but only marginally less so than their other appointments under Trump.  Ideally, socialists should push the Democrats to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution itself, by scrapping the Electoral College, and making all Supreme Court judges subject to annual election, but introducing any such constitutional amendments would itself run into opposition from a Supreme Court stuffed with Republican nominees put their to further the counter-revolutionary coup being undertaken by the petty-bourgeoisie, and its representatives within the Republican Party.

The Democrats should feel no compunction about using the impeachment process to get rid of those Republican political appointments, because impeachment is itself a political rather than legal process.  It is quite clear that the impeachment of Donald Trump by the House of Representatives demonstrated that he had broken the law, backed up by all the evidence from Mueller et al, but that his acquittal by a Republican controlled Senate was a political decision, pure and simple.  So, Democrats should feel no issue about using impeachment in he same political manner to remove the Republican judges that have been stuffed into the Supreme Court.

Socialists in the US, however, need to be aware that this counter-revolutionary coup is being undertaken, not just in the US, but in Britain and elsewhere too.  We should follow Marx's advice in standing, in action, with the progressive bourgeoisie to defeat that counter-revolutionary coup, but standing with them in action, does not at all mean subordinating our own organisation, politics or tactics to theirs.  We demand that the liberal and social democrats, and those that call themselves democratic socialists, at the least stand up for the revolutionary ideas under which the bourgeois revolutions were fought in the 18th and 19th centuries.  But, we warn workers that these allies cannot be counted on to do so.

In the US, workers should vote Democrat, and prepare to fight, in the elections.  Just getting rid of Trump is not enough.  Its necessary to defeat the the counter-revolutionary coup of the petty-bourgeoisie, and to do so by advancing our own proletarian revolutionary ideals.  Its necessary for socialists to use the elections to talk to millions of workers, to draw them into the political struggle being fought out within the Democrat Party itself, to take that political struggle into the trades unions, and all other organs of civil society, turning the Democrats outwards to the struggles of the working-class.  It is necessary, by these means to build the revolutionary core inside the Democrats that can create a real, mass, revolutionary, workers party.

Labour, The Left, and The Working Class – A Response To Paul Mason - Introduction

Paul Mason has again produced an interesting essay on socialist strategy which is provoking discussion - “The Left, The Party and the Class”. Just in provoking discussion, this is a good thing. Paul is anxious that the Left does not make the same mistakes that the Stalinists made in the early 1930's, during the so called Third Period, when they equated bourgeois democracy with fascism, and, indeed, described everything outside the Communist Parties as some kind of fascism, i.e. social fascism, Trotsky-fascism and so on. It led to a period of insane sectarianism, in which the Stalinist parties would not work with any of these other social forces to defeat the actual fascists who were about to come to power in Germany. It has to be said that the Social Democrats were also culpable, as they applied a similar sectarianism, in refusing to work with the Stalinists. Paul sees an equivalence of today's conditions with those of the 1930's, and so sees the danger of fascism once more, and wants to avoid a repeat of the Third Period. However, in doing so, he repeats all of the errors of the Stalinists and Social Democrats in the period prior to and after that, which were themselves equally fatal for the working-class, and for socialists. 

Paul makes a number of errors of analysis of current conditions, as well as illustrating a series of misconceptions about the terms he utilises in his argument and proposals, for example in relation to what is meant by the Workers' Government, and how it was viewed by the first four Congresses of the Comintern, before its Stalinisation, and by Trotsky, as described in The Transitional Programme. As a contribution to a response to Paul's essay, I want to discuss the economic situation, the political situation, the programme of the early Comintern, and The Transitional Programme, and what lessons this provides in the strategy of the Left today, in relation to the Labour Party, and the British working-class. In doing so, I seek to set out, in a comradely manner, the errors of Paul's analysis, and understanding of the relevant concepts, and to suggest how this should be corrected. 

In short, in trying to avoid the zig of the Stalinist Third Period, Paul has simply adopted the zag of the Popular Front strategy that the Stalinists adopted after its failure, which was, in reality, a return to the position that Stalin had held in 1917, and through the 1920's. It is the same idea that was put forward by the Mensheviks. It is the position of social-democracy, which is satisfied with a continuation of capitalism, and the subordination of the working-class to the needs of capital. Throughout history, it has led to disastrous consequences for the working-class, and to the triumph of reaction. Paul should read Marx's writings on The Revolutions of 1848, if he wants to understand that. And, given his fears of fascism, he should read Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which Marx describes how that very strategy on the part of the French social-democrats and Liberals led to the victory of that reaction. 

“During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: “property, family, religion, order.” Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism.” And finally the high priests of “religion and order” themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, of the family, of religion, and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski [a character from Heine’s poem “The Two Knights,” a dissolute aristocrat.] installs himself in the Tuileries as the “saviour of society.”” 

(Marx – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1) 

In 1917, Stalin, along with Kamenev and Zinoviev, held this position of effectively giving critical support to the government of Kerensky. Lenin fumed at that position. It led him to threaten to split the party, unless the party dropped that stance.  Trotsky notes,

"On March 6 he telegraphed through Stockholm to Petrograd: “Our tactic; absolute lack of confidence; no support to the new government; suspect Kerensky especially; arming of proletariat the sole guarantee; immediate elections to the Petrograd Duma; no rapprochement with other parties.In this directive, only the suggestion about elections to the Duma instead of the Soviet, had an episodic character and soon dropped out of sight...

On the 17th of March, through friends in Stockholm, he wrote a letter filled with alarm. “Our party would disgrace itself for ever, kill itself politically, if it took part in such deceit ... I would choose an immediate split with no matter whom in our party rather than surrender to social patriotism ...” After this apparently impersonal threat – having definite people in mind however – Lenin adjures: “Kamenev must understand that a world historic responsibility rests upon him.” Kamenev is named here because it is a question of political principle. If Lenin had had a practical militant problem in mind, he would have been more likely to mention Stalin. But in just those hours Lenin was striving to communicate the intensity of his will to Petrograd across smoking Europe, Kamenev with the co-operation of Stalin was turning sharply toward social patriotism."

(Trotsky - History of The Russian Revolution, Chapter 15)

Lenin's position was set out in The April Thesis, and Lenin got his way, whilst his opponents bemoaned that it meant that Lenin had become a Troskyist, having adopted the concept of permanent revolution. The lesson of permanent revolution, set out by Trotsky, goes back to the lessons learned by Marx and Engels in 1848 that the working-class can never rely on an alliance with the bourgeoisie, because, in the end, the bourgeoisie will always align with reaction, rather than cede power to a revolutionary proletariat. 

Lenin got his way in April 1917, and, along with Trotsky, began the work of preparing for the proletarian revolution. But, as Trotsky sets out in The Third International After Lenin, the triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev never really abandoned their former position, and after Lenin's death, they began to move the position back towards it. So, when the Chinese Revolution broke out, they lined up the Chinese Communists with the bourgeois nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang. The result, as Trotsky had predicted, was that the Kuomintang waited for the opportune time to turn on the Chinese Communists, who were murdered in their thousands, the consequence also being that Japanese imperialism was strengthened in China, and the struggle against it was correspondingly weakened. 

Just as the Stalinists went from their position of opposing the more rapid industrialisation that The Left Opposition proposed, to one of break neck industrialisation and collectivisation that led to the onset of famine and the deaths of millions, so too they went from their position of alliances with bourgeois nationalists to the Third Period madness of sectarian hostility to everyone and anyone. When the consequence of that became clear, as Hitler consolidated power, so they again swung back to their previous position, and the advocacy of the Popular Front that had led to disaster in China in the 1920's, in part to the failure of the General Strike in Britain, and then to the calamity of Spain, and the coming to power of Franco.

Failure to understand where we are, to understand the concepts involved, and the lessons of the past will lead to disaster once more.  The following posts will try to provide those lessons.

The Economic Situation (1)

How Capital Produces Capitalists and Capitalism, and Then Socialism - Part 13 of 13

Its, not literally true, therefore, that capital creates Socialism. It creates capitalists, and capitalism, and it also creates socialised capital, which is the material economic basis of Socialism. In the process, it creates a large, educated working-class, and, thereby creates the social agent required to bring about historical change. By socialising production, and socialising capital itself, it creates all of the material conditions from which this educated working-class should be able to develop the ideas required for Socialism. It should be able to recognise this socialised capital as its property, not the property of shareholders, or the capitalist state, for example. Consequently, it should be able to recognise the requirement to demand to exercise its rightful democratic control over its collective property. 

But, as the saying goes, you can take a horse to water. Unfortunately, the working-class, in the main, does not automatically arrive at these ideas. A minority retain an essentially peasant mindset. They see the attractions of exercising control over means of production, rather than being a dependent wage worker, but only in the context of wanting individual ownership and control. Some rise above this level, and recognise the need to create worker owned cooperatives, and although the number of cooperatives continues to grow, and in some spheres they play an important, even dominant role, in terms of capital overall, they continue to be subordinated. It is only in respect of the giant corporations that workers control over their socialised capital can play a decisive role, but, here, the demands of workers are more or less entirely missing. Workers, misled by their own social-democratic leaders, continue to accept the lie that this capital is owned by shareholders, and so fall into the trap of believing that before they can exercise control, those shareholders must first be deprived of such ownership, either by confiscation, or by being bought out. 

That facilitates the other lie purveyed by the social-democrats that to move forward one form of socialised capital, that of the corporation, must be replaced by another form of socialised capital, that of the nationalised industry. This Lassallean/Fabian statist ideology has misled the working-class for a century, and more. It was rejected by Marx in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, and the reason that simply looking to nationalisation as a step forward, is a dead end, was given long ago by Kautsky, who set out that the state never nationalises things in the interests of workers. 

“If the modern state nationalises certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labour, increasing its own revenues, and thereby reducing the contributions for its own support which it would otherwise have to impose upon the capitalist class. As an exploiter of labour, the state is superior to any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, it can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields.

The state has never carried on the nationalising of industries further than the interests of the ruling classes demanded, nor will it ever go further than that. So long as the property-holding classes are the ruling ones, the nationalisation of industries and capitalist functions will never be carried so far as to injure the capitalists and landlords or to restrict their opportunities for exploiting the proletariat.”

(Erfurt Programme) 

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that the most important thing, at every stage, is for the communists to raise the property question. The dominant form of property is socialised capital. It is that property which is progressive, and is the basis of forward movement. The owners of that capital are the “associated producers”, i.e. the workers and managers. However, the associated producers do not exercise control over this their collective property. The way forward, the basis of the property question is not the transference of this socialised capital to the capitalist state, but is the demand for the owners of that socialised capital, i.e. the working-class, to exercise their rightful control over it. 

A political struggle is required to change the law so as to enforce that right of control by the workers. It is that, which constitutes the class struggle that must be conducted.

Back To Part 12

How Capital Produces Capitalists and Capitalism, and Then Socialism - Part 12 of 13

The only secure basis of building Socialism, and of establishing a Workers State, is for the working-class to establish itself as ruling class, not in the negative way that occurred in Russia, as a result of all other classes being liquidated, but positively, by forming itself as a class for itself, and exercising direct, democratic control over the socialised capital/means of production, and by extending that into other forms of workers' democracy, exerting control over all other aspects of life. Only then does the class as a whole create the conditions under which its vanguard, chosen as its political representatives, acts in conformance with its wishes, and thereby exercise control over the state. 

But, the working class was never in that position, and the soviets were never a truly democratic representation of the class, as Trotsky's description of them attests. They were more a representation of those with the “sharpest elbows” able to lever their way on to them, whether they represented anyone or not, and in 1917, and after, that was increasingly the Bolsheviks themselves. And, instead of it being that workers control over production, on a day to day basis, fed through into workers representation on to the local soviets, the more it became the case that the flow was in the other direction, with the Bolsheviks exercising control over the soviets, which were then used to exercise control over the factories, transport and so on, and the element of direct workers' control and democracy was increasingly denuded, even where it had existed to begin with. What was created, therefore, was the same economic base of that German “modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation” - although as Lenin describes, actually the vast majority of the economy continued to be dominated by peasant production, and small scale petty-commodity production – with a Workers' State, but one that was increasingly separated from the working-class itself. It was a Workers State, in which the workers had little or no control, and in which the petty-bourgeois workers' bureaucracy were able to dip their fingers into the till, like a corrupt union baron, feathering their nest from the contributions of the union's members. 

As Hal Draper put it, 

“The distinction between the Bolshevik and social democratic variants of state socialism should not be ignored, but it is more a matter of degree than of substance. The 'degeneration' of the Russian Revolution was not a matter of Lenin's intolerance, nor of Trotsky's militarism, nor of Stalin's personality, nor of the economic backwardness nor of the relatively small size of the Russian working class, nor of the autocratic character of the Russian State, nor of the embattled position of the revolutionary regime, although all these factors played their part in determining the extent of the degeneration. The degeneration was already inherent in the class character of the revolution which underlay the statist conception of socialism which it adopted as its project.” 

(The Two Souls of Socialism) 

Indeed, for that reason the workers' state in Russia should really be described as deformed from the beginning, rather than “degenerated”.

Back To Part 11

Forward To Part 13

How Capital Produces Capitalists and Capitalism, and Then Socialism - Part 11 of 13

Lenin said if you take the economic content provided by monopoly capitalism and “a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, (and) you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism” However, this is not quite true, as the experience in Russia itself demonstrated. The state is an executive body, it acts as the executive committee of the ruling-class, but the class itself can never act as the state, nor can it act to directly supervise and control its actions. That is clear under conditions of Bonapartism. The bourgeoisie did not resort to fascism out of choice, but necessity, and the cost of doing so was that it lost its means of direct control over the state, which is usually exerted via the regime of bourgeois democracy. Bourgeois democracy is the favoured regime of the bourgeoisie, and keeps it firmly in control, precisely because it reflects the hegemony of bourgeois ideas in society as a whole. It is a reflection of the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in society, manifest in its day to day control over all aspects of that society. 

Similarly, for the working-class to exert such hegemony, and thereby to be able to operate via a system of workers democracy to control and supervise the actions of a workers state, it too must exercise day to day control over all aspects of life. As a minimum, it must exert democratic control over all of the socialised capital, in the same way it does over the worker owned cooperatives. This self-government, and self-activity by workers is the basic element of exerting this social hegemony. 

The idea that socialism could be constructed simply on the basis of these huge monopolies, but simply under the aegis of a Workers' State, was rejected by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. 

“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organisation of the total labour" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!.. 

That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionise the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.” 

Given everything that Lenin has said previously, about this same need to first transform society, to transform the social relations, it is surprising that in 1917/18, he adopts this Lassallean stance that all that is required is to seize control of the state apparatus, and then use it to turn the wheel of state in a different direction, and thereby to turn the wheel of society also in a different direction. That seems to be a capitulation to the ideas that the Narodniks were proposing in the 1890's. What is more, as he predicted, when he was arguing against those ideas, in the 1890's, it led to inevitable failure and disaster. 

Control and supervision over the state apparatus could never be exercised by the working-class itself. The bourgeoisie, as a much smaller, more compact, and developed class cannot achieve that, let alone the working-class. It is only ever the vanguard of such a class that can act in such a manner, but if this vanguard itself becomes too detached from the class, then it ceases acting as a vanguard of the class, and instead acts as a privileged social layer, pursuing its own interests. 

Simon Clarke wrote some time ago, 

“The social base of state socialism lies in the stratum of intellectual workers, including such groups as managers, administrators, scientists, technicians, engineers, social workers and teachers as well as the intelligentsia more narrowly defined.” These groups believe that the key to a more just society lies “in their mobilisation of their technical, administrative and intellectual expertise... The ability of this stratum to achieve its rationalist ambitions depends on its having access to positions of social and political power.” 

“For the working-class the Party is a means of mobilising and generalising its opposition to Capital and its State, and of building autonomous forms of collective organisation, while for the intellectual stratum it is a means of achieving power over capital and the state... As soon as the party has secured state power, by whatever means, it has fulfilled its positive role as far as the intellectual stratum is concerned. The latter's task is now to consolidate and exploit its position of power to secure the implementation of the Party's programme in the interests of the 'working class'. Once the Party has seized power, any opposition it encounters from the working class is immediately identified as sectional or factional opposition to the interests of the working class as a whole, the latter being identified with the Party as its self-conscious representative.” 

(“Crisis of Socialism Or Crisis Of the State?”, in Capital & Class 42, Winter 1990)

Back To Part 10

Forward To Part 12

How Capital Produces Capitalists and Capitalism, and Then Socialism - Part 10 of 13

The democratic control of the productive forces is not some secondary concern, but is fundamental, because without it, what exists is not Socialism, but merely some form of social-democracy in which the interests of capital continues to exert itself, albeit mediated by the interests of a layer of petty-bourgeois, bureaucrats, who become the best adapted individuals for such a set of material conditions, whether those conditions manifest themselves benignly as bourgeois social-democracy, or malignantly as Stalinism or Nazism, or some such variant. 

In a bourgeois social-democracy, the bourgeoisie remains the ruling-class, but the dominant form of property is socialised capital, which represents a heightened level of contradiction. The state immediately defends the interests of the ruling class, as owners of fictitious capital, but the interests of this fictitious capital is itself immediately contradictory to the interests of the socialised capital, which is the basis of the state and its continued existence. Hence, we have seen such states engage in QE to boost the prices of the fictitious capital owned by the ruling class, whilst implementing austerity that restricts the accumulation of real capital, again so as to hold down interest rates and boost asset prices. But, such policies are ultimately unsustainable, because eventually, the needs of the real capital will win out. It will break through, and asset prices will crash, and, then, as the ruling class turns its attention back to the search for revenues, i.e. interest/dividends, rather than capital gain, the state will again have to focus on measures that facilitate more rapid capital accumulation, and growth of profits, so that these additional revenues can be paid. This is a consequence of the fact that the dominant form of property is socialised capital, but the personification of that property, the “associated producers”, have not asserted their position as ruling class. 

Under fascism, again the ruling class remains the bourgeoisie, but the interests of the socialised capital are more violently enforced by the state, which takes into its hands the direction of the economy. The regime under fascism and under Stalinism may appear superficially the same, but under Stalinism, the working-class is the ruling class, as a consequence of the fact that the other ruling-classes have been physically liquidated, and their social roots ripped up. Under all these regimes, a huge petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic apparatus appropriates to itself a large portion of social production. Under bourgeois social-democracy, it is the price that the bourgeoisie pays for itself being removed from its social function in production; under fascism it is also the price that the bourgeoisie pays for the state suppressing a revolutionary proletariat; under Stalinism, it is the price that the working-class pays for having carried through a revolution before being ready to exercise political power directly itself in its own name. 

The socialised capital that is the material basis of all these regimes reflects the kind of regime that ensues. In the joint stock company, the bourgeoisie continues to exercise control, via its own bureaucracy, in the worker owned cooperative, it is the workers that exercise control, and yet they too employ professional managers to undertake this function on their behalf, and these managers may appropriate more or less power to themselves dependent upon the degree of control exercised over them. As Enron and Tyco demonstrated, the bourgeoisie itself faces this problem with the bureaucrats it appoints to act on its behalf, and must act every so often to call them into line. The capital of a worker-owned cooperative, as a transitional form of property, acts more or less as capital, as opposed to means of production, dependent upon its degree of development, and consequent freedom of movement, as well as upon the overall environment in which it operates. The more the company must compete with other capitalist firms, the more it must operate as capital rather than means of production. And, the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy, is like the managers in a worker-owned cooperative that continually dip their fingers into the till to feather their own nest. 

In a workers' state, even a deformed workers' state, such as that which was created in Russia, the state itself can create the conditions in which this socialised capital, in whatever form, acts increasingly as means of production, rather than as capital. But, Russia and the USSR did not exist in a vacuum, and had to buy and sell in the global market. They had to compete with huge economies like the US, where capital continued to dominate, and this meant that the means of production in the USSR, also could not operate entirely as just means of production. Once again, this demonstrates why Socialism cannot be created in one country, even a huge country like the USSR, but requires a combined effort by workers in a sizeable number of advanced economies. In the same way that commodity production, and competition leads initially to the creation of capital, and its development into capitalism, so continued competition by a workers' state with capitalist states, leads inevitably back towards the domination of commodity production, and dominance of capital over labour.

Back To Part 9

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How Capital Produces Capitalists and Capitalism, and Then Socialism - Part 9 of 13

Capital creates capitalists, who collectively form a capitalist class, and the ideas that the operation of capital engenders become the dominant ideas that infuse the state, creating a capitalist state, which defends the interests of capital. Capital then destroys the role of the capitalists in production, forcing them into the role of money-lending capitalists, owners of fictitious capital. The social function of the capitalist is taken on by a specific type of worker, the day to day manager, as the capital itself is collectivised, and becomes socialised capital. This socialised capital, is a transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. But, the capitalists, now, as owners of fictitious capital continue to exert control over this capital they no longer own, because their continued political power enables them to establish company law to that effect and to appoint executives to act on their behalf. But, no matter what the judicial reality, the economic reality is that the interests of fictitious capital (interest-bearing capital) are antagonistic to the interests of real productive-capital, and because the latter is dominant (it is only productive-capital that produces surplus value/profit without which payments of interest are impossible) it is the interests of the real capital that must always win out over the interests of fictitious capital. 

The class struggle is a struggle between different types of property that assumes the phenomenal form of a struggle between different social classes, only because these social classes are comprised of the individuals that are the personification of these contending forms of property. The progressive form of property is now the socialised capital, as a transitional form. It is the collective property of the working-class, including that portion of the working-class that now comprises the professional managers, or “functioning capitalists”. This is most clear in the case of the worker owned cooperatives. Taken as a whole, this large-scale, socialised capital, together with all of the planning and regulation that goes with a modern capitalist economy, provides everything that is materially required for the construction of Socialism. What is missing is the direct, democratic control over this capital, and over the state by the working-class. 

The workers could not establish such control until such time that capitalism had created the material conditions for such large-scale, socialised capital to begin with. That was, as Marx describes it, the “historic mission of capital”, to accumulate, concentrate and centralise the previously scattered means of production. Moreover, capitalism needed to develop to a certain level, before the workers could undertake this function, because capitalism must first forge a unified working-class on a large scale, and must develop the productive forces to such a degree that this working-class itself is educated and cultured so as to be able to take on all of these functions of a ruling-class, including immediately, being able to exercise such a role in the democratic control over production. Capitalism must develop to a stage, whereby, the working-day can be shortened, allowing the workers to educate themselves, and to have the time to devote to involvement in this day to day democracy. This is part of what Marx calls The Civilising Mission of Capital. 

Indeed, because Socialism is only conceivable at an international level, capitalism had to develop to a stage whereby it had created a global economy and global market, where capital itself becomes multinational, and a system of global rules for the operation and accumulation of capital are established (imperialism) founded upon the dominance of industrial capital. It means that an international working-class is created, able, then, to construct Socialism as an international system. 

For Socialism, democratic control of the means of production is required, but such democratic control is itself only feasible on the basis of a high degree of development of the productive forces and of the working-class, by capital.

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