Letters

Misrepresented

In his article, ‘Throwing babies out with the bathwater’, Ian Donovan asserts, without any supporting evidence, that Tony Cliff held the “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” (April 17).

It is an odd assertion, and one which will surprise those who have taken the trouble to read Cliff’s writings. In his 1948 document Cliff wrote that “even if the form of activity of the law of value in the Russian economy is very complicated and full of deep, internal contradictions, the law of value is nevertheless the central decisive factor in the movement of the Russian economy”. In his 1955 book he stated: “The law of value is thus seen to be the arbiter of the Russian economic structure as soon as it is seen in the concrete historical situation of today - the anarchic world market.”

Since Donovan actually provides a link to Cliff’s book, I assume he has read it. So I can only imagine that he has set out to summarise and condense a complex argument and ended up by stating the exact opposite of Cliff’s position. Presumably Donovan is thinking of Cliff’s argument that “if one examines the relations within the Russian economy, abstracting them from their relations with the world economy, one is bound to conclude that the source of the law of value, as the motor and regulator of production, is not to be found in it. In essence, the laws prevailing in the relations between the enterprises and between the labourers and the employer-state would be no different if Russia were one big factory managed directly from one centre, and if all the labourers received the goods they consumed directly, in kind” (1948).

Now Donovan may disagree with Cliff’s argument here: that is his absolute right. What is not legitimate is to present this, which is a stage in Cliff’s argument, as though it were his final conclusion. For, in abstracting the relations within the Russian economy from their relations with the world economy, Cliff was carrying out a purely hypothetical exercise. No national economy, not even Pol Pot’s Cambodia, exists in isolation from the world economy.

Donovan further muddies the waters by his reference to “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”. In fact Cliff’s position was quite different: “Hitherto Russia’s backwardness has ruled out any question of flooding foreign markets with Russian goods. On the other hand, Russian markets are kept from being flooded with foreign goods by the monopoly of foreign trade which only military might can smash. The combination of these two facts till now [Cliff’s emphasis] relegates the commercial struggle to a place of secondary importance, and gives the military struggle pride of place” (1948). Hence Cliff did not deny the existence of economic competition: he merely saw it as secondary at the time of writing, while recognising that the situation could change.

Donovan argues that Daum’s work has superior “predictive power” to Cliff’s. Perhaps. Cliff hoped that Russian state capitalism would be overthrown by workers’ revolution, of which the Hungarian rising of 1956 was the harbinger. He was wrong. But then Marxists, from Marx and Lenin onwards, have not been too hot at prediction. In January 1917 Lenin declared that “we of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution”. Lenin’s greatness was not in prediction, but in seizing the opportunities presented by an unpredicted situation.

Cliff’s theory doubtless has its limitations. All theories are approximations to a highly complex and ever-changing reality. Stalinism was a new and unexpected historical phenomenon, and it could scarcely be expected to fit neatly into categories developed in the 19th century. But serious debate is hindered, not assisted, by deliberate misrepresentation. For those who want to read what Cliff actually wrote, the relevant chapter of his 1948 document is at www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1948/stalruss/ch07.htm#s1 and that of his 1955 book at www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1955/statecap/ch07.htm.

Ian Birchall
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Junk theories

There is no better antidote to the eight decades of sterile debate on the left on the nature of the Soviet Union than an afternoon spent reading the Communist manifesto. The relentless logic of a relentless historical
mechanism driven by the development of the productive forces leaves little room for fanciful theorising. Though Marx and Engels toyed briefly and sceptically with the possibility that the Russian peasant commune might
provide a direct route to socialism, most of what they wrote on Russia, and all of what they wrote on everything else, leads to a firm ‘Nyet, comrade’. By the time Lenin put the finishing touches to ‘Capitalism in Russia’, even
the communalism in the Russian commune was dead.

Being painfully aware of Russia’s backwardness, and the ‘iron laws’ such conditions impose, the Bolsheviks hoped only that an alliance of workers and poor peasants could help establish some sort of popular and democratic government that could foster industrialisation, allow the popular classes to organise and educate themselves, and lay the foundations for a future socialist society.

The 1917 revolution was not ‘led’ by the Bolshevik Party. A socialist revolution was not part of its strategic perspective months before October 1917. The revolution was foisted on the party by a crisis in class
politics - exacerbated in the extreme by the consequences of a disastrous war - which could only be resolved either by the bloody defeat of the working class or its victory. No-one in the Bolshevik Party had expected the
revolution of February 1917 and from July 1917 onwards the Bolsheviks were dragged along by a working class rebellion in St Petersburg that wanted to destroy the existing order. Revolutionaries don’t make revolutions: they
only guide them to target.

Yes, the Russian Revolution was a crime against the basic postulates of Marxism that dictate that a society must reach a certain level of economic and industrial development before socialism can become a material reality. True enough. But what were the Bolsheviks supposed to do in 1917? Let the popular movement be crushed because the historical moment was not the right one? Lenin saw the Russian Revolution as a ‘holding operation’ until the European revolution got underway. That the European revolution did not materialise is not the Bolsheviks’ fault. They did their best in an almost impossible situation not of their making.

Once the material basis for the revolution vanished, Russia had only two options. It could implode and revert to capitalism by being swallowed up by powerful capitalist states - or it could degenerate into a brutal
dictatorship, in which the more powerful and the more organised asserted themselves. Had the dominant capitalist powers not been so engrossed in destroying each other between 1917 and 1945, Russia would have succumbed to the west.

It is nonsense - stupid, bourgeois, infantile nonsense - to believe that ‘if Lenin had lived longer’ or ‘if Trotsky had triumphed against Stalin’ things in the Soviet Union could have been any different. It is pathetic how
readily so many Marxists abandon a serious materialist analysis in favour of fantasies based on personalities. Had Lenin lived, he would have either become a dictatorial bureaucrat, as many previously honest Bolsheviks had,
or he would have been eliminated as a threat to the emergent dictatorship, as were so many others. The descent into a brutal, chaotic dictatorship began under Lenin. He identified it, and did his best to counter it. But
there was nothing he could do about it.

The same would have occurred with Trotsky. Indeed, Trotsky did a tremendous and lasting damage to Marxism by personalising the nature of post-revolutionary Russia. Stalin was not the problem: he was the product. There was no Stalinism, just another brutal, backward state - albeit a large one - trying to manage. There was no ‘revolution betrayed’. The revolution was defeated because the material and strategic basis for it - a European revolution - never came about. There was never any theory of ‘socialism in one country’ - just an attempt to make a virtue out of a bad, bad situation: an isolated country, struggling to be independent, accosted on every side by predatory imperialist states.

All the theories developed by the left about the nature of the Soviet Union are junk, and mostly self-serving and self-satisfied junk. The honourable exception is Hillel Ticktin, who rejected ‘mode of production’ and ‘hybrid social formation’ theorising in favour of looking at the basics, as a Marxist should. A battered, backward, ill-organised nation struggling to survive in a vicious world, itself turning vicious, managing as best it
could, until finally it could not manage any longer.

Susil Gupta
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Two theories

Different revolutionary socialist organisations have two distinct theories about how to achieve socialism, which is reflected by their differing strategies on all sorts of issues, including defeating austerity.

The first theory is that revolution happens or starts in one country first, which inspires the masses in other countries to rise up and overthrow their ruling classes too. This was the model pursued in Russia flowing from the October 1917 revolution, but a combination of factors meant it didn’t work - Russia being a semi-feudal country at the time, about 20 foreign armies invading to try to restore capitalism, the naivety of the German Communist Party, combined with the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, preventing the revolution spreading, and the disastrous decision to abolish the Constituent Assembly.

The second theory is that revolutionary movements happen more or less simultaneously, either due to a concerted mass movement initiated by the masses across the world - with the ability of workers to withdraw their labour via general strikes or, particularly, mass strikes from below, as advocated by Rosa Luxemburg - or due to another massive global financial crisis, such as in the euro zone or a repeat of the 2007-08 credit crunch.

I have actually argued for both strategies at different times, and I currently think that there is no way of knowing how world events will develop making either strategy better. It is healthy that different socialist organisations take different approaches, since, if socialists ‘put all of our eggs in one basket’, our enemies would change strategies to defeat us.

The two theories are reflected in issues such as Scottish and Catalan independence - with pretty much all Marxists supporting their right to self-determination, but with some (including the CPGB) calling the approach of the Scottish Socialist Party and others advocating Scottish independence, including the Radical Independence Campaign, ‘left nationalist’. They make similar claims about ‘No2EU, Yes to Workers’ Rights’, which calls for withdrawal from the European Union.

There was a cynical, opportunist argument made by some leaders of Scottish Militant Labour, at a conference of that organisation in Manchester, when arguing in favour of advocating Scottish independence, that they needed to do so ‘in order to gain the ear of the youth’ (with many young people supporting independence at that time). From the floor, I spoke about Scottish people generally being more radical than the UK population as a whole, partly due to the poll tax, where Militant’s role was significant, with possibilities of a capitalist independent Scotland leading to the “socialist independent Scotland” the SSP argues for, and with the first western country to go socialist quickly leading to the spread of the revolution across the rest of Britain, Europe and the world. I was criticised at that conference for proposing a ‘stages theory’, such as that of the original CPGB, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong!

Steve Wallis
Manchester

Trot pox

Lars T Lih and Ben Lewis have been accused of “recycling the Second International” in the most recent issue of the Spartacists’ self-titled theoretical journal. The phrase ‘neo-Kautskyite’ carries a lot of baggage with it that I’d prefer to leave behind, but I must first point out how ironic it is that the Spartacist League - quite aware of the typical inversion of the word ‘Trotskyist’ to ‘Trotskyite’ by Stalinist outfits calling for an ‘ice pick in every Trot’ - still chooses to use the same outmoded language. While it’s more likely I stand closer to the Spartacists than I do to Lih in regards to an interpretation of the legacy of Bolshevism, that’s not the purpose of my letter.

In regards to the innumerable Trotskyist groupings which are performing rapid mitosis as I write this (and the pseudo-Marxist groupings which think a lowest-common-denominator programme is the basis for unity and merger talks), I was brought to thinking of the ilk of those who have labelled Lih and his co-thinkers Kautskyites. The International Bolshevik Tendency, which considers itself a propaganda group that more closely resembles a flea that will perish when their former host does, is led by one Bill Logan, labelled a sexual sociopath and monster by the Spartacists in documents and articles that can be found elsewhere.

After Logan was expelled and went on to found the New Zealand-based Permanent Revolution group, a story goes that he and members of the organisation were holding a meeting in a pub. In the typical ‘democratic centralist’ faction, discussion raged and decisions were made through a showing of hands. This scenario continues with Logan raising his hand to vote for a resolution, followed by the entire mass of the membership raising theirs. Logan, however, begins questioning his decision and slowly drops his hand back to his side, causing the mass of hands to slowly err downwards, before Logan decides he was right all along and raises his hand again, with the mass of subsequent hands once again rising to affirm his decision.

This is faintly reminiscent of how, in his novel Infinite jest, David Foster Wallace describes an addict who, waiting on his provider to either ring him or knock on his door, hears them both at once: “and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once, finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something’s been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.”

This mechanism is nothing new in tiny sectlets, whether run by charismatic aficionados in the Healy vein or just those who detach dialectics from the scientific method, making it only graspable by a tiny, enlightened leadership. I suppose I should get to the point. In regards to Lih’s argument that the conception of the Leninist vanguard party as a strictly disciplined, centralised organisation was actually only applicable to the period where the Bolsheviks were forced underground and should not be the model for revolutionary organisation today, I ask what proponents of his research assume an abstract, forthcoming revolutionary situation will look like. With the prostration of most of the Second International organisations before the war drive, was the Bolshevik opposition to this not a political distillation that assisted in making possible the inception of the world’s first workers’ state?

We know the bourgeoisie finds no situation which it cannot weasel out of. Thus, if a broader party today were based more on the merits of early German social democracy, as Lih and many in the CPGB infer Lenin vehemently defended, does it not flow from experience that eventually we as revolutionaries will be forced underground if we seek eventual reprieve from the sting of the armed state apparatus? In regards to this, we’ve all seen the hands go up and down in support of cult leaders and this gets us nowhere. However, keeping hands in the room just for the sake of broadness doesn’t seem to have much in common with steeling fighters against this system. I’d prefer not to put a pox on every house in this argument.

Corey Ansel
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Co-op options

I agree with much of Paul Demarty’s article on the Cooperative Group (‘Circling the drain’, April 17). The main weakness was its failure to actually suggest a course of action for Marxists to take in response to the situation.

First, to take issue with one point that Paul makes. He says: “They are a proven defensive tactic on the part of the working class, against the monopolistic and immiserating tendencies of capitalism.”

But it is as a defensive tactic that the weakness of co-ops is illustrated. The idea of a co-op as a means of combating unequal distribution was a concept of Bernstein, and was rightly criticised by Rosa Luxemburg, in Reform or revolution, on that basis. So long as co-ops, like trade unions or reformist political parties, are seen only as defensive rather than offensive weapons, the working class will be unable to move forwards because, as Marx showed, the unequal distribution is merely a function of unequal ownership of the means of production. It is no more possible to remedy that by defensive action by co-ops, than it is by attempts to raise wages, or to redistribute wealth and income via the tax and benefits system.

That is why Marx and the First International advocated producer co-ops rather than retail co-ops, for instance. Marx wrote: “We recommend to the working men to embark in cooperative production rather than in cooperative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system; the former attacks its groundwork.”

In the programme he wrote for the International, his and Engels’ closest collaborator, Ernest Jones, wrote to the co-op conference on behalf of the International, advocating the establishment of a large co-op federation: “A national fund thus established, would, in all probability, be a large one - and place a great power in the hands of the association. Persecution would be far more difficult. Now each society stands isolated, and is attacked in detail by the combined forces of monopoly - then to touch one would be to touch all. The national centralisation of popular power and popular wealth (not its local centralisation), is the secret of success. Then restrictive political laws would be far more difficult, for they would encounter a gigantic union, instead of a disorganised body.”

In other words, the worker-owned producer co-op directly posits worker-owned property in opposition to capitalist property. It implies the kind of class-against-class struggle that Paul rightly says the economists, with their emphasis on trade union struggle and its extension into the political sphere, can never rise to. That struggle, as Marx rightly describes in his ‘Inaugural address to the International’, leads inexorably to a political struggle waged by the workers’ party, backed up by the other workers’ organisations, to defeat the inevitable attempts of capital to limit the growth of the workers’ property.

The development of worker-owned property in opposition to capitalist property is the basic element of the class struggle, just as the development of bourgeois property within feudalism was the basic element of the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudal relations. It is the material foundation upon which the economic and social strength of the revolutionary class is built, and out of which the ideas for the new society are developed; it is the groundwork upon which the organs of the new workers’ state are built, and the workers’ democracy is developed in opposition to those of the bourgeoisie.

But Paul is right to point to the fact that the problems of the Co-op mirror the problems of bureaucracy, etc, that bedevil the rest of the labour movement. Indeed the degeneration of the Co-op has much in common with the degeneration of the deformed workers’ states. It’s for that reason that I have suggested that what is required in the Co-op is a political revolution. The starting point is that the trade unions and wider labour movement, as part of the current calls for restructuring, should demand that the Co-op be transformed into a worker-owned, rather than member-owned, co-op. The former requires that the workers participate in its internal democracy and incentivises them to do so in a way that a member-owned co-op, or state-owned enterprise, never can. But, as part of that, we also need to bring all of the cooperative organisations together into a single federation, preferably across Europe, in the way Marx and Jones suggested.

I would also caution against Paul’s cool response to the trade unions’ attempts to control pension funds. My only concern here is that it’s an attempt to control without ownership. The trade unions need to be waging a campaign for workers’ pension funds, which total around £800 billion, to be brought legally under the workers’ ownership and control, rather than the ownership of capital and the control of the banks, as at present.

In Capital volume 3, Marx wrote: “The capitalist stock companies, as much as the cooperative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”

He saw workers using credit to extend their ownership and control of both on a national scale. We should not fail to use the resources already in our pension funds to short-circuit that process. If we look at the Mondragon Co-op workers’ pension fund, for example, we find that it provides an average pension of around £13,500 per annum. Not only is that far in excess of the state pension in Britain, despite the fact that wages are generally lower in Spain, but it is around four times the supposed gold-plated pension of a state-capitalist sector worker in Britain. The reason is that the former is under the ownership and control of the workers themselves. In Britain ownership and control is in the hands of capital and its state.

Arthur Bough
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Scab role

The presentation in the Weekly Worker of my paper to the Critique conference on April 12 was evidently unclear - my fault - since comrade Yassamine Mather’s report missed the main points of it (‘Imperialism, war and crisis’, April 17). These were, first, that a section of the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany left (not just sections of the right and centre) went over to the ‘Victory to Germany’ position in autumn 1914; second, that these people - Alexander Parvus, Max Beer, Heinrich Cunow, Paul Lensch, Konrad Haenisch - had been to a greater or lesser extent critics of imperialism before the war. My paper sought to explain why they made this scab mistake.

On the one hand, in their pre-war writing on imperialism, this group had the merit of not underplaying the role of British imperialism, as Kautsky did. But on the other hand, Parvus, who probably led the turn to pro-Germanism, had in 1908-10 developed rejection of the SPD centre’s line as ‘passive’, but also of Luxemburg’s political mass-strike line as unrealistic. He counterposed to both lines the alternative of putting ‘socialisation’ (ie, nationalisations) first and democracy second, and of exploiting the likely war with this aim. In August 1914 he argued that, once war broke out, there could be (to use modern terminology) no ‘third camp’, but the working class would have to choose one side or the other, and German victory would be historically progressive relative to Entente victory, which would involve the victory of tsarism.

Lensch went on to argue that the British empire was the main problem in the world economy (probably true, but the US, not Germany, was to break it up) and he and Haenisch promoted the war planning measures of the German kaiser regime as Kriegssozialismus (‘war socialism’). Here Parvus’s proposal to deprioritise issues of democracy in favour of ‘socialisation’ had its ugly fruit. But the core of all the group’s argument was the absolute necessity of taking one side or the other in any war. If this is conceded, it is probably true that the central powers looked more ‘progressive’ than the Entente.

Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Refusal to read Parvus and co’s arguments on the ground of their scab role has led large sections of the modern left to repeat their fundamental errors, both on undemocratic nationalisations and on wars.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

Money counts

With only a few hours’ notice, about 50 people turned up at Sheffield’s St Paul’s Hotel to protest at the national launch of the UK Independence Party’s election campaign on April 22.

Unfortunately, the small rally displayed not so much the chauvinism of Ukip, but the political confusion of the Socialist Workers Party - and its inability to organise any kind of decent or imaginative protest. Yes, there was little time to organise, but surely somebody could have brought a megaphone. People just generally milled around, chatting to each other. Some ventured inside the hotel, a few screaming abuse at the attendees of the launch (well over 500 people); others tried to get tickets for the meeting.

The SWP brought some rather strange posters, demanding “Ukip, go home”. Apparently, so I’m told, this was a clever way of “throwing their own slogans back at them”. No, it actually confused SWP members. One of them screamed at Ukip supporters to “get out of Sheffield”. “I’m from Sheffield, idiot,” came the prompt riposte. (The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty held up equally eccentric, homemade posters, declaring that “Ukip hate women”.) And, of course, there were a few obligatory shouts of “Racist scum!” There are undoubtedly many racist members of Ukip, but their programme is plain and simple national chauvinism.

For Ukip anybody rich enough is welcome to enter Britain - the colour of their skin does not matter. Nigel Farage, a real class fighter, only discriminates against the poor. Weekly Worker supporter Lee Rock challenged Farage in the actual launch meeting. He read out a point from Ukip’s election leaflet: “Immigrants must financially support themselves and their dependents for five years. This means private health insurance, private education and private housing.”

A similar position is, of course, held by that old stalwart of the left, George Galloway. In a notorious article back in 2004, he demanded “controlled immigration”. He wrote that “we should publish an economic-social-demographic plan for population growth based on a points system and our own needs”. He also felt that “every country must have control of its own borders - no-one serious is advocating the scrapping of immigration controls” (see Weekly Worker February 24 2004). Farage only wants to let rich people in; Galloway only wants to let those in who do jobs that nobody else wants to do. Funnily enough, Galloway far better expresses the needs of capital than that oddball, Farage.

The SWP, playing foot soldiers to Galloway at the time in Respect, certainly agreed with him and fought tooth and nail against all attempts by the CPGB to add the fight against immigration controls to Respect’s manifesto. Left Unity, on the other hand, whose ruling clique is far to the right of the SWP, does not have a Bonapartist figure to please and adopted a policy of open borders at its first policy conference in March (while rejecting many other demands that we “just can’t sell out there”, as the aspiring Labour MP, Salman Shaheen, put it at conference).

In Sheffield, Farage did - from his perspective - a decent enough job trying to answer comrade Rock. (Farage, it must be said, is an excellent speaker. He joked that “we should sign up David Moyes. After all, he got Manchester United out of Europe - maybe he could do the same for Britain.”) He said he wanted to copy the examples of Australia and America, which “don’t just let everybody in”.

But when comrade Rock heckled, “What about private schools? Who in this room can afford to send their kids to private school for five years?”, he was promptly escorted to the door by not one, not two, but four burly security guards.

Tina Becker
Sheffield

Levellers

Imperative for the workers’ movement, for any serious movement, is the defence of past gains. When capitalists use neoliberalism, including mass immigration, as a conscious weapon to discipline workers and drive living standards down, workers should defend their standard of living by resisting mass immigration.

Alan Johnstone argues that, if workers defend themselves against mass immigration and ‘hold the fort’ against newcomers, they instigate class divisions (Letters, April 17). Alan overlooks that it’s in the nature of the class struggle that workers must defend the ground we’ve conquered when capitalists use other workers to undermine class gains. Even successful strikes would be impossible if workers heeded Alan’s advice not to claim ‘first here’ rights. When workers win a strike, if they followed Alan’s philosophy, they wouldn’t object if the boss fires some of them to make greater profit by hiring replacements. They would reason, ‘What greater right have I to a higher wage than a hungry fellow worker?’ Even within the group of strike victors, there will likely be ‘prejudice’ favouring those longest holding the job: unions demand seniority rights for ‘first here’ workers.

Alan sees in immigration restrictions a contradiction to the socialist policy of opposing invidious discrimination, but socialists should defend a right to equal treatment for citizens as a bourgeois-democratic right, whereas abolishing nation-states is a socialist task. The premature (anarchist) demand for open borders under capitalism means that working class conquests, won within national borders, should be surrendered.

The open borders demand substitutes moralism for strategy; it bespeaks a deep confusion about the requirements of proletarian morality. The logic of ‘don’t defend the fort’ is that world revolution should mean immediate international levelling. How to justify a higher national standard of living against immediate international redistribution, when you defy human nature by demanding that workers avoid becoming losers? Open borderists will never explain to workers why international revolution doesn’t entail the immediate levelling of wages. They’ll want to know. Holding on to what you have is a driving force for revolution: matters have changed since Marx said workers have nothing to lose but their chains.

Stephen Diamond
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