24.08.1995

The politics of transition

Peter May from the RDG says the demand for a federal republic is a revolutionary minimum

I WRITE in response to Danny Hammill’s article, ‘Stageist road to socialism’ (Weekly Worker 106) where he criticises Dave Craig’s article, ‘Leading the fight for democracy’. In doing so, I will focus on one paragraph of comrade Hammill’s article to try and clarify the differences between the two authors.

The paragraph begins:

“Evoking the spirit of Engels and Lenin, David claims that by applying Marxist dialectics to our centralised bourgeois monarchy, it is obvious that it will evolve into its opposite, a federal republic”.

The actual quote from Dave Craig’s article is:

“ ... They [Engels and Lenin] did not see the British state as a fixed, unchanging entity. On the contrary, applying Marxist dialectics to our centralised bourgeois monarchy, they saw that it was evolving and would continue to evolve into its opposite, a federal republic.”

This means that the bourgeoisie, in order to maintain its rule, must find solutions that transcend the contradictions contained within its existing state power.

In response to revolutionary democratic pressures from below they would have to concede a federal republic if it could not defeat those revolutionary forces.

Comrade Hammill continues his paragraph: “At the risk of sounding facetious, surely the opposite to our centralised bourgeois monarchy would be a centralised proletarian state.” This is incorrect.

The centralised proletarian state is the opposite to the bourgeois state per se - that is, to bourgeois rule in general. The political form of bourgeois rule is not relevant here: whether it is centralised or federal; monarchical or republican; democratic (parliamentary) or bureaucratic, military or fascist dictatorship.

Whatever the form of bourgeois rule, the centralised proletarian state is its opposite. Furthermore, the proletarian state has to be centralised, as it is not possible for the proletariat to overthrow a national section of the bourgeoisie, and its state, without centralised organisation.

Comrade Hammill’s mistake is reductionism. He considers the form of bourgeois rule to be irrelevant to the real political struggle against it, and that, whatever the form, bourgeois rule is all the same and its opposite is a centralised proletarian state.

What this reductionism does is deprive the dialectical process, in real historical development, of its content. That is: comrade Hammill cannot understand, “and locate in any concrete reality”, the antithetical role of the demand for a federal republic in our struggle against the current form of bourgeois rule which is the UK state.

To state as our aim a centralised proletarian state is fine, but revolutionary democratic theory understands that this can only result from a revolutionary democratic struggle that must begin in the present concrete reality. That requires a transitional politics to take us through the building of working class organised power to the position where we can demand ‘all power to the soviets’.

This transitional politics is our revolutionary minimum; not the centrism of demanding a Labour government, nor the ultra-leftism of nothing less than socialist revolution as a solution to all immediate problems; but the revolutionary demand for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales and a united Ireland.

The process of revolutionary change cannot be begun other than in a revolutionary way.