17.04.2014
Throwing babies out with the bathwater
Are those who refer to the USSR as state-capitalist just ‘taking moral distance’ from Stalinism? Ian Donovan responds to Mike Macnair
Mike Macnair claims that he is engaged in an “educative” process in his reply to my earlier article1 criticising third-campist politics. But in fact, his reply2 contains some logical inconsistencies that will be anything but educational for those who read it, and will only increase confusion. Replying to every one of the unfocussed points in detail would require an inordinate amount of space. So I take up here some key points that get to the most important of the differences between us.
Mike claims that my amendment, which attempted to introduce a state-capitalist characterisation into the Communist Platform, was in the tradition of “various lefts” who allegedly use the term ‘state capitalism’ to “take moral distance from Stalinism”. There is some real irony in this statement, since no alternative analysis of the nature of Stalinism is provided in his article. In fact, if anything can be accused of simply seeking to put “moral distance” and nothing more between its authors and Stalinism, it is the existing formulation in the Communist Platform (partly derived from the earlier Socialist Platform): “We reject the idea that the undemocratic regimes that existed in the former Soviet Union and other countries were socialist, or represented either the political rule of the working class or some kind of step on the road to socialism.”
This purely negative assessment contains no analysis of what the Stalinist regimes were - only what they were not. But this will not convince anyone of its proposition. It contains no Marxist analysis of what the Stalinist regimes were. Why should anyone listen to a bare assertion that presents no analysis to justify itself? You can “reject” an idea until eternity, but until you replace it with a better one, you will not overcome it.
The mainstream of the CPGB is aware of this, and has the beginning of a theory - of the USSR as an “ectopic” society or an “evolutionary dead end”, but they are not sufficiently confident of its coherence to put it forward in a ‘broader’ context such as the Communist Platform bloc. Hence the agnosticism of the draft as put forward, which was subsequently adopted.
Such agnosticism is not strength, but a weakness, and belies, for instance, Mike Macnair’s facile equating of a variety of different theories of Stalinism as ‘state capitalism’. Mike notably makes an exception for Lenin’s use of the term to describe the early industrial enterprises of the Soviet state, but there is no logical reason for this, except perhaps deferral to Lenin’s authority.
There is no Marxist reason to equate the varying uses of the term by Kautsky, Cliff, Raya Dunayevskya/CLR James or Walter Daum. Why, in any case, should Kautsky be criticised for seeking to take “moral distance” from Stalinism, since he opposed the Bolsheviks before Stalinism existed? Kautsky can be justly criticised for many things, but none of them provide any motive to seek moral distance from Stalinism (which did not exist in 1919, when he formulated these views). Such generalisations are just inattentive.
Cliff vs Daum
The varying contents that such common terminology hides can be illustrated in the case of Tony Cliff and Walter Daum respectively. Cliff’s theory of bureaucratic state capitalism in the USSR is a ‘third system’ theory in real terms. This is revealed by his view that the law of value, which is the historically specific economic law that is fundamental to capitalism and drives its specific form of exploitation - the extraction of surplus-value from the working class and its realisation in the market - was absent in the USSR.
Coupled with Cliff’s insistence that the competition of the USSR and its satellite states with the western capitalist powers was purely of a military nature, not economic, this pointed to a society in which the driving forces in its internal and external economic relations were something other than the law of value. Cliff elided round this fundamental difference between his ‘state capitalism’ and the capitalism as analysed by Marx (or for that matter the European/American imperialist monopoly capital described by Lenin) by a mystification between ‘military’ competition over use values and the law of value. This was never explained, but made the law of value intangible and non-operative. Ultimately, his way out of this was the postulate that Soviet-style ‘state capitalism’ was a higher form of capitalism than ‘normal’ imperialism. Thus dismissing the idea that the USSR could revert to a more conventional capitalist model:
Anti-Stalinist opposition forces in the USSR, however unorganised and inarticulate, strive consciously or semi-consciously, even unconsciously, towards a goal which, by and large, can be inferred from the economic, social and political set-up of bureaucratic state capitalism, the set-up which these forces aim to overthrow. From a state-owned and planned economy there can be no retracing of steps to an anarchic, private-ownership economy. And this not only, or even mainly, because there are no individuals to claim legal or historical right to ownership of the major part of the wealth. The replacement of large-scale state industry with private industry would be a technical-economic regression.3
The lack of predictive power of this is obvious. But more important is that if this analysis had corresponded with reality, Cliff would have been describing a non-socialist society in which the law of the determination of value by socially necessary labour time - the most fundamental law of capitalism - had been abolished. Obviously this would have been a new, basically stable, mode of production that was neither capitalist nor communist. This was a third-system theory, and the real content of Cliff’s third-campism, notwithstanding his use of the term ‘state capitalism’.
Daum’s understanding is very different. Derived in part from insights developed by James and Dunayevskaya, Daum and the US ex-Shachtmanite trend, the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), developed this into a coherent understanding that the law of value continues to be the dominant and determining material force in a statified economy, where competition, private property in the means of production and even money itself is suppressed.
This would be the case even when the proletariat is in power through its own political party - though such a government would engage in prolonged, conscious effort to abolish that dominance. This could only succeed through the abolition of material scarcity via the internationalisation of the revolution and the development of the productive forces, to the point that the iron necessity for the exchange of equivalents begins to wither away. The law of value, after all, is the law of the compulsive tendency for equivalent and proportional amounts of crystallised average labour time to be exchanged for each other in the form of differing use-values - not as a planned process, but as a blind average of fluctuating prices in anarchic economic conditions.
As long as material scarcity dictates the need for such equivalence as a norm, suppression of such forms merely creates a modified expression of this law, in an analogous manner to that in which the formation of prices of production from ‘pure’ value, described by Marx in volume 3 of Capital, is a modification of the operation of the law of value on the basis of the law of value itself. In the case of what Daum came to describe as “statified capitalism”, such formal suppression of ‘normal’ capitalist forms must mean a form of capitalism prone to chronic economic inefficiency and a rate of profit that declines even more steeply than under classic imperialist monopoly. This results from the far greater centralisation/concentration of capital involved and the artificial maintenance of full employment, which was a residual gain of the workers’ revolution that the regime had overthrown (but which it dared not immediately move to abolish).
Predictive
The salience of this analysis is shown by its ability to prefigure the events of more than a decade later, when it was first formulated in the late 1970s, in the aftermath of apparently major victories for Stalinism, such as the US defeat in Indochina. Even before the theory was fully solidified in terms of its terminology, it had real predictive power. For instance, the LRP wrote in 1978:
Our state-capitalist (perhaps more accurately described as ‘state-monopoly-capitalist’) [or more recently and correctly ‘statified capitalist’ - ID] analysis rejects the idea that state capitalism is a new or higher stage of capitalism, either on a worldwide or a more limited basis. This analysis, in contrast to past state-capitalist theories … does not see this society as an end-product of capitalist development in the advanced countries, even though we are fully aware of the tendencies inherent in capitalism that lead in that direction. In the face of a strong proletariat we agree with Trotsky that the chances for state capitalism are limited, since the target of a nationalised productive system is far too tempting. Russia, as a result of its own build-up, has moved into the position wherein it can no longer maintain a viable state capitalism, and it totters on the brink of crisis, while attempting to introduce a variety of pluralist and open market forms. For all its development, Russia is profoundly weak and dependent on state monopoly imperialism. It aggrandises itself within the compass of maintaining the fabric of western-dominated imperialism.
Earlier in the same article there is a remarkable passage about the future of the Stalinist states that is really startling, considering this was published in 1978, in the light of what subsequently happened in 1989-91:
Unable to catch up and create an independent national position for themselves within the capitalist world market, these nations devolve back into the orbit of state monopoly capitalism and move in the direction of its systemic forms (though a political revolution is necessary for full devolution).4
This analysis was systematised and broadened out in Walter Daum’s book The life and death of Stalinism in the late 1980s, in the context of the final crisis of Stalinism, but the above passages show that its predictive power was there much earlier, was considerable and thus its analysis deserves serious study and engagement for Marxists. It appears likely, from the facile equation of this analysis with Cliff’s and even Kautsky’s (!) by Mike, that he has not read, or certainly not studied, this work.
Third-campism - as a political critique of the politics of the dominant trend of the CPGB (among others), is not dependent per se on the class nature of the USSR. In attacking such concepts as ‘Not a workers’ and not a bourgeois state’, Shachtman’s ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ or Burnham’s concept of ‘managerial society’, Trotsky (in In defence of Marxism) was not only attacking those who reject the degenerated workers’ state theory of the USSR, but also, as a distinct strand, those who posed the USSR as a third system. Trotsky’s understanding of the relationship between these strands was flawed, but over the second strand he was completely correct.
Genuine Marxist statified-capitalist or state-capitalist analysis is not third-campist at all, but third-system theories are - they posit the existence of another contender for power other than the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Trotsky’s 1939-40 attack on the historical pessimism growing out of third campism was correct, notwithstanding that his theory of the USSR was already outdated and he had failed to understand the true historical significance of the great purges of 1938-39 as representing the final victory of the counterrevolution in Russia.
Third-camp politics today mainly involves extending this concept to justify neutrality between oppressed peoples and imperialism. Hence we get the concept of ‘reactionary anti-imperialism’ - justifying a ‘plague on both your houses’ position regarding such struggles between imperialism and, say, Iraq or Iran. The politics of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty are an archetype of this, openly based on Shachtman’s theories and not-so-openly owing much to Burnham’s as well.
Anti-imperialists
Another example of such politics is the Worker-Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq (WCPI), and their various splinters, who embraced this analysis after drawing false lessons from Stalinist betrayals in those countries. Their polemics settled on a policy of neutrality about the national rights of the Arabic core of Iraq under occupation when joint, coordinated uprisings between Sunni Fallujah and Shia Najaf/Kerbala took place in spring of 2004. This form of third-campism influenced the CPGB possibly more than the AWL in the years since 9/11.
Regarding Mike Macnair’s analysis of the Iraq war: it is historically false to denounce the Al Sadr movement as things stood in 2004 as puppets of Iran. The Iranian regime at that time supported the Supreme Council of the Islamic Republic in Iraq (SCIRI) and its armed wing, the Badr brigade, which was part of the US puppet government in 2004, and tried to suppress Al Mahdi with considerable bloodshed. Whatever may have happened later after the uprisings were defeated, it was utterly false to make such equations at that time.
This is rather like equating the two sides in the Irish civil war in the early 1920s on the grounds that both sides adhered to a formally similar ideology. The fact that one side was then fighting imperialism while the other was killing them on imperialism’s behalf is a difference that compels Marxists to take sides. No matter what they may have done later.
An examination of the later career of Eamon de Valera and his clericalist governments makes the point perfectly about the correct Marxist attitude to take to this kind of conflict. Or does Mike argue that Marxists should have been neutral between Michael Collins’ collaborationist free-state government and de Valera’s Irish Republican Army in 1922-23? Or conversely, does he argue that different criteria should apply in a Muslim country, where Islamic radicals are involved in resisting imperialism, than in Ireland, for example?
I can see no reason why any different criteria should apply. I can think of reasons why some on the left might capitulate to this idea, particularly in tailing after the politics of the WCPI - a section of the Iraqi/Iranian left which responded to political Islam by embracing imperialism and western Islamophobia as implicitly progressive. But that is not a correct Marxist position.
It is also false to say, as Mike implies, that the 2004 uprisings were “sectarian”; how does he then explain the coordination of Najaf/Karbala with Sunni Fallujah? The Iranian and Iraqi regimes/SCIRI and the US/UK occupiers coordinated their attempts to crush both Fallujah and the Sadrists. It is perfectly valid for communists to compare the assault on Fallujah with such crimes as Guernica or the Warsaw ghetto - and just as obligatory to take sides openly. Particularly given the use of radioactive and chemical weapons against the population - or ‘shake and bake’, as the US called it.
They would have done the same to Najaf and Karbala if it were not for the fear that this would produce a much wider reaction among the Shia, destroying the regime. Instead they relied on Shia collaborators such as SCIRI to defeat the movement in the Shia South and undermine it politically. The WCPI said this was a “war of terrorists” in which they could take no side. That was third-campism in action.
The CPGB comrades do not always refuse to take sides when an uprising is led by nationalists. They made a major public polemic in siding with the Kosova Liberation Army, for instance, in its 1999 war against Serbian occupation of Kosova. Likewise for the Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein - notably in 1991 - and rightly so! It also supported and gave solidarity to armed actions against apartheid led by the ANC. Again rightly so.
But this did not extend to the core Arabic-speaking areas of Iraq when these were placed under military occupation, even when they were embroiled in a joint uprising across Sunni-Shia sectarian lines that clearly had mass support. Such support was much more evident than, for instance, the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. To dismiss this joint uprising as ‘sectarian’ is a complete inversion of reality, as behind it was a fragile anti-sectarian impulse. This hides a failure to extend solidarity others rightly received to insurgent masses in Arabic Iraq under imperialist occupation. They deserved no less. This appears to single out Arabs and Muslims as uniquely undeserving of such solidarity - a disturbing position in a period of Islamophobia as an imperialist ideological weapon.
The early Comintern’s ‘anti-imperialist united front’ (AIUF) is a complete red herring in this debate. That was about some level of political bloc between the Soviet government and various leaderships of colonial liberation movements, some of whom had achieved governmental power. It is perfectly possible to reject such blocs, and still advocate taking sides with uprisings led by such forces. This is the position Trotsky advocated during and after the Chinese revolution of 1926-27, extending through the Japanese aggression in China in the 1930s.
It is perfectly possible to have rejected political alliances with the ANC, and yet support mass struggles, even armed ones, that it led against apartheid. One presumes in fact that this is still the position of the CPGB on this historical question - a refusal to take such a public side in such uprisings would be rightly seen as shameful. But, according to Mike’s logic, by taking a side in such conflicts the CPGB would be embracing the flawed, half-Bolshevik-half-Menshevik AIUF position that the early Comintern briefly advocated before the rise of Stalinism. Mike’s use of historical analogies is confused, to say the least.
Respect
Mike’s recapitulation of the ‘popular front’ allegation against Respect no more makes sense than previously. None of the Stalinist ‘unpopular fronts’ that he refers to would have dared to call for resistance to their own ruling class in a colonial war, as Galloway did over Iraq. A similar policy was adopted about Iran at Respect’s first delegated conference in 2005. None of these ‘unpopular fronts’ would have challenged the ruling class’s war effort while a war was still being fought on the basis of such policies and win a significant seat. Such actions would be unthinkable and utterly incompatible with the popular-front strategy, which is aimed at the formation of a joint government of bourgeois workers’ parties and outright parties of the ruling class, and at erecting a barrier against the possibility of the working class taking power.
The real reason for the demonisation of George Galloway was his support for Arab resistance to imperialist conquest, which, though correct, was dictated in part by his softness on Arab nationalism. This continues to this day, despite his left-reformist politics and sometimes his individualist errors that have helped isolate him. It was a serious error for the CPGB to partially partake of this demonisation also, notwithstanding Galloway’s softness on Arab nationalism.
In reality, insofar as it did indeed deviate from strictly pure models of class independence, Respect actually bore real resemblance to an electoral version of the early Comintern’s ‘anti-imperialist united front’ which Mike was misanalogising in his article. Far from being the kind of counterrevolutionary instrument that the Stalinist popular fronts were, this was a flawed tactic aimed at promoting real struggle against imperialism and hopefully (in the eyes of its revolutionary component) a bridge to revolution. In the case of Respect, the aim was not revolution itself, but the revival of a militant left reformism on the basis of anti-imperialism. It takes a real myopia for Mike Macnair to equate these two strategic trends, which revealed their very different natures in real life - for instance, when popular-front governments in France, Spain, etc supported the suppression of revolts by colonial people.
Respect at its peak was an alliance of militant left-reformists, putative revolutionaries and angry Muslim radicals who rejected jihadism in favour of an alliance with the anti-imperialist left. More like Baku in 1920 than the Stalin-Laval pact of 1934. If the comrades had oriented to it in this way, they might have had something to say to its militants, instead of being seen as the far-left wing of the anti-Galloway/Islamophobic witch-hunt, which was unfortunately the case at the time.
And the allegation that Respect had no appeal to anyone other than inner-city Muslims is simply untrue. The most serious blow against that view was the election victory of Respect councillor Ray Holmes, an ex-miner, in an almost completely white council seat in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, in May 2007, winning 53% of the vote. Like so many positive things in the past period, this was ultimately wasted. It, however, compares very well with the best results of other left initiatives. It also completely contradicts Mike’s schema - I do not remotely see how he can explain it from the standpoint of his position.
Proletarian camp
To sum up, I would like to take up Mike’s opposition to including positive references to the Bolshevik revolution and the Paris Commune in the Communist Platform. Mike writes: “My own view is that to single out the Paris Commune and October 1917 as what the platform ‘stands on’ - as distinct from ‘standing on’ the whole history of the workers’ movement, including those attempts - is to risk writing into our platform the modern far left’s fetishism of the revolutionary movement at the expense of the preparatory tasks of workers’ organisation and the struggle for a majority.”
It seems to me that we cannot stand on the “whole history of the workers’ movement”, as the workers’ movement has during its history made many steps backward, many defeats, some of which were eminently avoidable, and has at times during its history been dominated by leaderships and dominant practices that were reactionary or even counterrevolutionary. At the same time there have been major struggles short of revolution that have also led to significant victories; conversely both these short-lived revolutionary victories gave way to defeats and periods of reaction.
If Mike merely wishes to say that we stand on every real forward step and advance for the workers’ movement, then I concur, though I do not see how such a position could justify opposing the positive references to revolutionary events that the Communist Platform endorsed. It is also correct to endorse preparation and the struggle to win the majority of the masses to the communist programme. What is dangerous is a fetishism of ‘preparatory’ practices for their own sake, which could conceivably lead to the kind of divorce between the practice of the workers’ movement and its goals that the Second International indulged in, with disastrous consequences. The most stark formulation of this being Bernstein’s statement that “The movement is everything; the final goal nothing”. Not that I am accusing Mike of sharing Bernstein’s politics, but if preparation does not openly proclaim its goals and concretise them, what is it ‘preparation’ for?
Mike asks whether various bourgeois and petty bourgeois trends which lead oppressed masses in struggles - for instance, in underdeveloped countries subject to imperialist aggression - should be regarded as part of the camp of the proletariat. Obviously with regard to the leaders themselves, the answer is usually no. But that does not exhaust the question. What of the masses that participate in such struggles? Even when they are not directly part of the working class, as in oppressed sections of the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, etc, they are still part of our constituency, insofar as there is a democratic content to their struggles.
The existence of severe women’s oppression, or the oppression of gays, or similar questions in many backward countries does not constitute a reason for refusing to support struggles against national oppression in the manner of the WCPI, for instance. Indeed such a stance actually undermines the fight against such oppressions by associating those advocating such social progress with pro-imperialist capitulation and national oppression, thereby increasing the authority of reactionary trends among the oppressed. ‘Pinkwashing’ and the like has done no favours to gay rights or progress generally in much of the semi-colonial world.
This is a self-defeating position that breaks not with any post-1917 deformation of communism, but the responsibility of communists to be the tribune of the oppressed, which was one the most important programmatic conquests of Bolshevism prior to 1917. This is just as true on an international scale as it is within individual states.
I will not address Mike’s position on imperialism at length, except to note that whatever similarities may have existed between the colonial adventures, slavery and the like of early capitalism, and the imperialism that emerged in the late 19th century, the distinction between a social system in its period of ascent, despite its brutalities, playing a progressive role and qualitatively increasing the productive power of humanity, and the imperialism of the 20th century onwards, which threatens to destroy all these advances and more, plunging humanity into barbarism, is fundamental.
Mike in fact appears to concede that modern capitalism does threaten humanity with destruction, which itself is a major difference from the epoch when Marx and Engels, in continental Europe, were seeking to bring the bourgeoisie to power to lay the basis for the future growth of the proletariat and the socialist revolution.
But the main effect of his theory is to blur the distinction between capitalism’s constructive phase and the current destructive slow decline, dismissing in the process the idea that proletarian revolution is objectively possible in anything other than a very long-term perspective - and after the destruction of US hegemony. This implies that the weakness of the working class is not merely subjective, but that there is a strategic objective barrier to working class power. With this perspective, the concept of the proletariat acting as a tribune of the oppressed in the here and now is seen as an irrelevance.
Mike has done some useful things in his Revolutionary strategy in pointing out that the Third International threw out, along with the opportunism and chauvinism that was allowed free rein in the Second International, a good deal of the openness that also characterised the Bolshevik Party in its pre-revolutionary period - the very openness that enabled it to become a genuine mass formation able to take power at the head of the working class in the first place.
Mike is correct that the revolutionary Comintern came to fetishise the ‘purifying’ split, which is ultimately self-defeating, as opportunism - if not refuted consciously over and again - will reappear to infect the most ‘pure’ party organisation, as long as it maintains its roots in social reality. In this sense the Comintern threw out the baby with the dirty bathwater and laid the basis not for Stalinism (which was something completely different), but for today’s fragmentation of the Trotskyist left, who are the real successors to the Comintern with all these faults.
But Mike is also guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater - albeit a slightly different baby, in the opposite direction. Many of the things he seeks to throw overboard - support for the struggles of peoples in underdeveloped countries against imperialist aggression - are not post-1917 deformations, but basic components of the socialist programme, going back to 1885, when the British Marxist pioneer, William Morris, gave courageous public support to the resistance in Sudan led by Mohammad Ahmad ‘al-Mahdi’ against the British general Gordon (which resulted in Gordon’s death). The scramble for Africa from the 1880s was the decisive event that transformed early colonialist capitalism into modern capitalist imperialism - the dating of which was one aspect of Lenin’s understanding of imperialism where he erred.
This is part of a proud socialist tradition, the nemesis of the chauvinist trend in British socialism typified by HM Hyndman, which was part of the baleful capitulation to imperialism that destroyed the Second International. Morris’s exemplary anti-imperialism was an anticipation of the issues that would later be key to the division between social-chauvinism and genuine communism, which despite its deformations was a principled and necessary split. Without that split there would be no basis for a Communist Party, which, reforged or otherwise, is the foundation stone of our movement l
Notes
1. ‘Not a matter of style’, March 13.
2. ‘Anti-imperialist illusions’, March 20.
3. T Cliff State capitalism in Russia chapter 9: www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1955/statecap/ch09.htm.
4. Quoted from ‘Is nationalised property proletarian?’ Socialist Voice No6, spring 1978.