23.07.2015
Social democracy should govern
Marxists should not stand on the sidelines in the struggle between socialised and fictitious capital, urges Arthur Bough
Eddie’s Ford’s last two articles1 on Greece illustrate the problem with his analysis. It reminded me of Trotsky’s comment that Hugo Oehler would rather see the workers defeated than his own position falsified.2
Eddie crows: “But Syriza could never deliver, for all its fine promises about ending austerity and ushering in the social democratic promised land. Never in a million years.”3 Why could Syriza not deliver? What iron law of history leads Eddie to such abject defeatism? He should illuminate us, so we do not waste time supporting Jeremy Corbyn!
He argued Syriza should only take office if it won an electoral majority. Otherwise, Syriza should take up a position of “extreme opposition”. I had sympathy with this position.4 When Syriza were two votes short of a majority, I argued they should govern alone.5 But when it formed a government with Anel, what attitude should Marxists have adopted? Trotsky’s formulation: “With the workers always, with the workers’ leaders sometimes”.
Syriza is a social democratic party. Its programme is not about effecting a transformation of social and productive relations, but modernising Greek capitalism within existing productive and social relations. If it ameliorates the workers’ position, Marxists can give it critical support. Eddie’s rejection of that principle mimics the purists criticised by Marx.6
On that basis, he should distance himself from every strike! He is sounding more like the Socialist Party of Great Britain than the CPGB. Of course, Marxists point out that strikes cannot provide a solution to workers’ problems, but any Marxist who sought to distance themselves from the workers’ or union leaders engaged in such a struggle is not worthy of the name.
Marx warned Parisian workers against rebellion, but flung himself into defence of the Commune. In 1917, the Bolsheviks assumed power under inauspicious conditions. The revolution was doomed, if an international revolution did not rescue it, yet Marxists had to do all in their power to defend its gains. As Trotsky describes in his History of the Russian Revolution, the question was not whether the Bolsheviks should carry through the revolution or withdraw to allow the Mensheviks or Socialist Revolutionaries to take power.
Either the Bolsheviks took power or the country would be thrown into a period of bitter reaction - only worse, because the imperialist powers had their sights on carving up Russia. The choices we have in real life are not those we would have if planning history from a textbook, but between ‘bad’ and ‘bloody awful’. As Engels puts it in relation to attacks on workers’ wages, “In a commercial crisis the union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly ...”7 But Eddie would no doubt accuse Engels of a “humiliating capitulation”for such a suggestion, or would have wanted to have distanced himself from the workers and union in the first place.
Trotsky and Mexico
In Mexico, in the 1930s, Lázaro Cárdenas attempted to build a state-capitalist economy. He looked to the USSR as a model. When Cárdenas nationalised the British oilfields, Trotsky gave his support. But a Trotskyist group around Luciano Galicia criticised the Mexican president, and by implication Trotsky, because Cárdenas gave compensation to the British oil companies.
Trotsky wrote disparagingly of “these people”. When it came to the task of modernising the economy, Trotsky did not concern himself that Cárdenas was a Bonapartist rather than a revolutionary Marxist, but recognised that even a partial advance, like a development of the Mexican economy, was one that Marxists should support. Analysing Mexico’s second six-year plan, Trotsky writes:
But the country is poor. It needs foreign capital ...
Turning one’s back on foreign capital and speaking of collectivisation and industrialisation is mere intoxication with words ...
The government ... can grant industrial concessions, above all in the form of mixed corporations: ie, enterprises in which the government participates ... The period fixed in the contract before the optional buying out of the enterprise would create the necessary confidence among capital investors. The rate of industrialisation would be accelerated.
And:
There has been no socialist revolution in Mexico. The international situation does not even allow for the cancellation of the public debt. The country, we repeat, is poor. Under such conditions it would be almost suicidal to close the doors to foreign capital. To construct state capitalism, capital is necessary.
Greece is not Mexico. It is part of the European Union. This question of writing off the debt, and of acquiring the necessary capital to carry out the modernisation of the economy, is phrased in different terms, because more than sufficient capital exists within the EU to implement such a programme. An alternative to austerity has been adopted in the US, and could be adopted in the UK and EU. It was entirely correct, therefore, for a social democratic party to pose the question starkly about the need for the EU to stand behind the Greek economy, because it exposes the contradictions at the heart of the EU, and the need for social democracy to address those contradictions, which otherwise will blow the EU apart into competing reactionary national capitals.
The EU is a state that is not a state - power is in the hands of the component nation-states. It is a single market that is not a single market - without a single state there is no level playing field for all capitals operating within it. It is a single currency that is not a single currency - some countries are outside it, and even within the euro zone individual countries face different interest rates, borrowing individually on global money markets; and no single state stands behind its central bank, able to provide a single fiscal framework and fiscal transfers of the kind Greece currently needs.
It is for those reasons that the current events comprise part of an overall struggle of social democracy, required to address those contradictions. Social democracy is the manifestation of the interests of big industrial capital (socialised capital), whilst conservatism is the representative of fictitious capital (and remnants of private capital). It is not at all impossible for this struggle to result in the victory of the former over the latter. Marxists should not stand on the sidelines of that struggle, but be a part of it, because, as Marx sets out in Capital,8 it is socialised capital that represents the transitional form of property between private capitalism and socialist property. That does not mean cheer-leading Syriza, but it does mean providing critical support when social democrats move in the right direction, rather than standing aside in sectarian style to avoid having your purity stained.
Eddie argued that Syriza should only take office if it had the support of the majority. If an election were held today, it would have such a majority. But the 61% ‘no’ vote in the referendum is an even better indication of that support, of continued opposition to austerity and for renegotiation of the debt. Faced with such a vote, Eddie is forced to claim that it is not a vote for Syriza and against austerity after all!
He says:
Looked at it in this way, the ‘no’ vote on July 5 was not a blow against austerity - except in the heads of the 3,558,450 who voted that way on the day, just as a large proportion of those who voted ‘yes’ in the Scottish referendum thought they were voting against austerity economics.
That is the same type of distortion as when the conservatives tried to equate a ‘no’ vote with a vote to leave the euro, although the Syriza leadership had been vehement in saying the opposite. Syriza’s position, as opposed to that of the Scottish National Party, is that a solution for Greek workers can only be found across the EU as a whole - a position that the CPGB holds too. Paul Mason says: “The Greek government has no mandate to leave the euro, as the 61% ‘no’ vote ... was clearly won as a ‘stay in and fight’ mandate.”9
The difference is that Syriza is trying to win such support by attempting to build a movement to change the underlying conservative structures of the EU, whilst Eddie wants to wait until those conditions simply drop into his lap.
Eddie’s position is totally divorced from reality, and totally contradictory. He tells us that Syriza should not take office because the conditions for achieving socialism do not exist, that the economy in Greece is in a terrible state, and that socialism is only possible at a single strike across the whole of Europe. On the other hand, he wants to argue that things are so rosy that “We are fighters for consistent democracy and working class independence, not haggling with EU and IMF bureaucrats.”
Presumably a government led by Eddie could avoid such haggling by going straight to the socialist transformation of the economy! To put it another way, Eddie will avoid any intervention in the actual class struggle for fear of contamination, and content himself with airy-fairy propaganda about the socialist millennium. Even in terms of the referendum we are left not knowing whether Eddie would have voted ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or whether he would have joined the KKE in even abstaining from that!
No compromise?
In 2010, I warned that a lot of the rhetoric sections of the left were coming out with was dangerous, because it implied that the problems of Greece could be resolved if only it had the right leadership and programme. The economic condition of Greece - lacking capital, being globally uncompetitive - would not go away simply upon the creation of a workers’ state. The idea that Greece’s problems can only be resolved on a European basis is correct. But even if we view that in its ultimate form as the need for a Socialist United States of Europe (which appears some way off), the question is how that might be brought about.
A continent-wide revolution requires that workers’ consciousness be at a high and fairly equal level. The only basis for that would be a prolonged period when workers transform the material conditions of their existence, creating Europe-wide, worker-owned cooperatives, developing forms of workers’ self-government, and so on, welding together their organisations and class identity on a European level. Eddie offers no suggestion of how Syriza, or anyone else, might promote such a strategy, but the point is that workers face challenges in the present, which must be addressed.
We should advocate the extension of co-ops that have spontaneously developed in Greece to meet the needs of its workers; encourage the transformation of Greek banks into worker-owned cooperatives; demand all cooperative and other labour-movement bodies across Europe mobilise in support of the Greek workers, providing them with practical assistance in the form of finance, materials, and so on out of the huge resources that European cooperatives possess. The Greek government should cancel its membership of Nato, and dismantle its armed forces, developing in its place a workers’ militia as an element of workers’ self-government.
In the real world, compromises are sometimes forced on us. Trotsky stated, in relation to the advantages the USSR had over Mexico:
Despite all these advantages the industrial reconstruction of the country was begun with the granting of concessions. Lenin accorded great importance to these concessions for the economic development of the country and for the technical and administrative education of Soviet personnel.
And, as Lenin himself puts it,
Every proletarian has been through strikes and has experienced ‘compromises’ with the hated oppressors and exploiters, when the workers have had to return to work either without having achieved anything or else agreeing to only a partial satisfaction of their demands. Every proletarian - as a result of the conditions of the mass struggle and the acute intensification of class antagonisms he lives among - sees the difference between a compromise enforced by objective conditions (such as lack of strike funds, no outside support, starvation and exhaustion) - a compromise which in no way minimises the revolutionary devotion and readiness to carry on the struggle on the part of the workers who have agreed to such a compromise - and, on the other hand, a compromise by traitors who try to ascribe to objective causes their self-interest (strike-breakers also enter into ‘compromises’!), their cowardice, desire to toady to the capitalists, and readiness to yield to intimidation, sometimes to persuasion, sometimes to sops, and sometimes to flattery from the capitalists.10
Eddie insists the demands of Syriza are unachievable, so, therefore, if Syriza had to compromise on achieving its demands, any such compromise falls into the latter category. So such leaders are entitled to critical support, as we would support any other group of workers, together with their leaders who fought, but were forced to compromise, given unfavourable conditions.
Greece has suffered from the imposition of austerity, and the new deal implies that austerity will continue. But does anyone doubt that, had Syriza refused to take office when it won the election, that would not still have been the case? And if Syriza adopted a position of extreme opposition, does Eddie believe that the troika would then have provided the necessary bailout and an end to austerity? What would be the goal of this extreme opposition? Either ultimately society would collapse or it would concede to the austerity - or Syriza, with a large majority, would be forced to take office, whilst those material conditions still existed!
Similarly, Eddie writes in relation to the writing off of the debt, after the International Monetary Fund and US treasury secretary Jack Lew put pressure on the ECB and EU: “We wait to see, however, whether or not this produces a change of heart in the EU and ECB. But if it does it would represent a major shift in global strategy.”
But what “global strategy”? Eddie previously told us that there could be no such global strategy, because the reason the debt could not be written off was that there was no global hegemon to bring it about!
The reason that conservative forces are opposing Syriza and trying to force them from office is not because writing off the debt is impossible, or even because putting in place the kind of social democratic measures to restructure and renovate Greek capitalism are impossible. It is because they, unlike Eddie, recognise the role that Syriza’s struggle is having in undermining conservative and nationalist ideology across Europe, including within the conservative/Blairite ranks of the existing social democratic parties.
Marxists do not present the kind of social democracy that Syriza or Jeremy Corbyn represent as socialism, or the final answer to workers’ problems. But, when it comes to the kind of serious struggle between conservatism and social democracy that has been unleashed across Europe, and which is itself an indication of changing material conditions, we should reject the kind of third-periodist sectarianism that Eddie’s position represents: that of seeing no difference between the two.
Notes
1. ‘Austerity in modified form’ Weekly Worker July 9 2015; and ‘Berlin turns Greece into debt colony’ Weekly Worker July 16 2015.
2. L Trotsky, ‘Oehlerism and the French experience’ Writings 1935.
3. ‘Berlin turns Greece into debt colony’, July 16.
4. http://boffyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/why-syriza-cannot-buckle-part-3-of-7.html.
5. http://boffyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/greek-elections-syriza-should-govern.html.
6. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm.
7. F Engels Condition of the working class in England: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch10.htm.
8. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm.
9. http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/4131/4131.
10. ‘Leftwing’ communism: an infantile disorder: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch08.htm.