11.04.1996

Idealist tendencies

Initial comments on the draft programme of the CPGB by Phil Sharpe of the Trotskyist Unity Group

On point 1 - ‘Our epoch’

The perspective on the transition from capitalism to socialism ontologically assumes as its starting point for understanding social reality that transition has an inevitable and imminent character: “The present epoch is the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism. The main contradiction in this our epoch is between decadent capitalism and imminent socialism.” This ontological standpoint is in a constant tension with the attempt to uphold a non-mechanical conception of historical materialism which doesn’t assume an objectivist and fatalistic conception of history. However because this tension is not recognised the result is a theoretical ontological eclecticism - an adherence to a viewpoint which tries to maintain and uphold these conflicting and irreconcilable ontological premises for understanding the epoch of imperialism and the class struggle: “Because the communist revolution begins as a political act by an oppressed class, its inevitability in no way implies that the negation of exploitation, alienation and unfreedom is mechanically assured.” In other words there is some attempt being made to retain a formal commitment to an ontological understanding of the open-endedness of class struggle because of its political character; yet this is ideologically contained within the view that history contains a one-directional end in ‘non-mechanical’ terms.

This ontological rigidity - what Roy Bhaskar has characterised as ontological monovalence - is premised upon an accommodation to the view that the Party as the most active subject of history can define the object - capitalism - through a form of identity reasoning. In historical materialist terms this means that the proposed programme glosses over any systematic attempt to outline the significance of the existence of the post-capitalist USSR for understanding the imperialist epoch of capitalism. The bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR is not a historically specific aberration, in which the general laws of the inexorable transition from capitalism to socialism are still valid. Instead it expresses the hybrid interaction of the capitalist, bureaucratic and socialist modes of production (The latter is characterised by its ontological absence and continual suppression by the presence of the other two modes of production). This dynamic ontological process of interaction means that contemporary history is not characterised by the law of the negation of the negation, in which capitalism and the bureaucratic mode of production will ultimately give way to socialism. Instead the advent of regressive and reactionary alternatives to capitalism shows that the overthrow of declining capitalism is not necessarily an overall ascent from the lower to higher forms of social development. Hence to cling to the rigid ontological conception of the negation of the negation is to perpetuate the ideological illusion that the party as the philosophical subject of history defines the historical truth of the object. This represents a gloss on the ontological problem concerning proletarian revolution, and the change of quantity into quality in emancipatory terms. Namely, because the proletariat is a constant threat to the hegemony of the capitalist class, the capitalist class has acquired the most conscious understanding of the need to continually oppose and prevent the possibility of proletarian revolution.

This to not to deny that capitalism is a declining system. In his economic works Bukharin has outlined how the operation of the law of expanded negative reproduction means that capitalism has a tendency towards the inability to meet material needs on a world scale. In a specific form this law operated within the Soviet Union in the form of primitive ‘socialist accumulation’ and the exploitative extraction of a surplus from the proletariat. The ontological dependency of the Soviet Union (the reproduction of a hierarchical form of capital-labour relations, as outlined by Meszaros in Beyond Capital) upon capital as a world system was ideologically denied by the development of utopian petty bourgeois socialism - the view that the part (the USSR) defined the whole in the atomistic and teleological terms of the USSR representing the ‘essence’, centre and purpose of world history. This idealist denial of the ontological location of the USSR within the dependent and hierarchical systemic system of global capital-labour relations was ideologically upheld through a particularist conception of world revolution as unfolding through rigid and isolated stages of uneven development.

In other words, Stalinism represented a continual hostility to the strategic perspective of simultaneous international proletarian revolution (This ontological denial of systemic interconnections is also upheld by the theorists of state capitalism and degenerated workers states). Yet Stalinism was not against the bureaucratic expansion of its mode of production so long as it conformed to this idealist and teleological view of history. The recent inability to expand this system and so continue to represent a viable historical alternative to capitalism - the inability to structurally assimilate Afghanistan because of the increasing objective problems of capital accumulation, combined with an increasing ideological demoralisation which could not uphold this idealist view of bureaucratic revolution - facilitated the restorationist programme of Gorbachev; the perspective, as Meszaros outlines, of ‘There is no alternative to capitalism’. The CPSU began to realise that it no longer represented the idealist party subject of history in particularist terms, and so starting with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, began to accept the historical possibility that capitalism was the end of history. The idealist acceptance of the empirical relation of philosophical truth - instrumental historical freedom - to actual historical truth - the rationality of the real - was premised upon an increasing accommodation to the complete and full totalising project of the logic of contemporary capital. Trotskyism has been part of this ideological crisis of Stalinism because of an acceptance of a similar idealist view of history, and so the demise of the bureaucratic social formation has challenged the orthodox view of the Soviet Union as the telos of world revolution through political revolution. Consequently, the absence of philosophical and historical materialist reflection upon the ontological significance of the events of the last few years has facilitated a massive ideological crisis. The proposed CPGB programme does not address, but is rather part of this crisis.

On points 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6

The CPGB draft programme outlines how the reforms gained in the period of the post-war settlement are being undermined, and what is required is the call for a programme of action based around a series of transitional demands:

“The formulation of our demands thereby connects today’s conditions and consciousness to the aim of revolution and the establishment of socialism.” This perspective accommodates to the expression of reformist consciousness, as spontaneously developed by workers engaged in various struggles, that it may be possible, even in a situation of the decline of capitalism and despite previous severe defeats of militant trade union struggles, to obtain serious concessions from the ruling class. These idealist illusions are expressed in the call for the ‘right’ to a minimum wage, the ‘right’ to work, and for decent pensions and working conditions, etc, because in moralistic and subjective terms these rights are demanded from the bourgeoisie. In other words, the proletariat alienates and projects its class aspirations onto the bourgeoisie as the basis for realising these demands. This moral call to realise rights is abstracted from the operation of economic activity under capitalism on the basis of the law of value. For under conditions of declining capitalism it is essential to decrease socially necessary labour time (SNLT) in order to increase the extraction of surplus value and to try to tackle the problem of increasing unviability of expanded capital accumulation. This requires both an increase of relative and absolute surplus value through structural transformation, mass unemployment and the development of generalised low wage economies on a world scale. The introduction of new technology facilitates this decrease in SNLT, and so the development of white collar work actually increases capital-labour antagonisms rather than ameliorates them.

Thus, as less workers are required in order to increase absolute and relative surplus value, there is no objective basis for reformism. This is because it requires conditions where full employment is vital to the process of capital accumulation. Instead the decline of capitalism continues alongside the further development of the productive forces, an ontological context which means that the limited era of reforms of the Cold War period within the imperialist epoch has come to an end. Consequently, left reformist demands accommodate to the logic of capital, in that the strategic aim is to modify the operation of capital on the basis of a moralistic call to realise ‘rights’. This form of utopian socialism contradicts the strategic perspective of international proletarian revolution. In this ontological context the call for the right of the free movement of labour can only be realised under conditions of the realisation of the international dictatorship of the proletariat, given that nationalist ideology is intensifying because the nation-state is increasingly anachronistic in economic terms, but is politically required in order to divide the proletariat. Nationalist ideology helps to consolidate the view that there is no alternative to capitalism; and in this sense facilitates particularism and sectionalism.

Most of the demands in relation to women, sexuality, youth, the aged and religious freedom are uncontentious, but reliance upon a shopping list of demands around a democratic minimum programme once more implies that right can be guaranteed in bourgeois democratic terms. This call to realise the bourgeois democratic programme of timeless and moral rights glosses over the situation where the era of bourgeois democratic advances has come to an end. Furthermore the need for ideological struggle to win the oppressed to support a strategic perspective of proletarian revolution is glossed over by this emphasis upon a minimum programme of demands. In this context, what is required is an ideological challenge to the hegemony of philosophical idealist interpretation of oppression in terms of a post-modernist, relativist, particularist and subjective idealist world view, in order to establish a new proletarian concrete universal capable of challenging world capitalism. These crucial philosophical and ideological tasks cannot be reduced to the schematic formulas of a programme and a related series of demands. Rather a protracted ideological stage of cultural revolution is required if we are to objectively consider the possibility that the proletariat is becoming a class for itself, and in order to move to the next possible stage of political revolution to overthrow capitalism (by no means inevitable, which makes theoretical tasks even more crucial). This point can also be applied to the later evaluation of the trade unions which are assumed to be basic defence organisations of the proletariat in static and timeless terms rather than considered as possible ideological and political obstacles in regards to the tasks of cultural revolution. Political idealism consists in trying to skip over these stages of proletarian revolution through a substitutionist emphasis upon minimum demands as the objectivist telos of a maximum programme.

The evaluation of the national question in regards to Scotland and Wales is premised upon the view that the democratic realisation of national self-determination is part of the perspective of proletarian revolution. This represents a call for a mythical realisation of the national question which is abstracted from the ontological conditions of contemporary capitalism. The most recent process of the realisation of the demand for national self-determination in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has been reactionary, but not because this has been the basis to undermine bureaucratic planning (The bureaucracy needs little help in this regard). Rather it is politically reactionary on its own terms because national self-determination has led to the particularist, communalist and exclusivist domination over a minority social grouping - the repressed other of society. The contradictory tension between nationalist ideology and anti-imperialism is being resolved on the basis of a pro-imperialist nationalism, and an accommodation to imperialism in direct opposition to the possibility to build the international unity of the proletariat. In Ireland the continuing anti-imperialist content to the national struggle represents a partial exception to this tendency, but only in the short term. The need for a federalist and pluralist democratic political structure cannot be realised on the basis of the absolute and timeless demand for national self-determination. Instead the present realisation of this demand is in opposition to federalism through repressive state centralisation and national chauvinist ideology. Only international proletarian revolution can resolve outstanding national questions. In this ontological context the present draft CPGB programme represents an accommodation to the alienated ideology of nationalism.

The most progressive and promising part of the draft programme is the section on the dictatorship of the proletariat. The commitment to maintain both the leading intellectual, theoretical and political role of the party, together with a call for pluralism, multi-party democracy and opposition to the elitist monolithic vanguardist party of the CPSU, represents an important step forward from a party originating within Stalinism. The economic aspects of this approach is seen in the commitment to the development of workers’ control through building the unity between the proletariat and party, rather than through a schematic call for blanket nationalisation of the means of production. The political and ideological emphasis upon the balance of class forces in order to resolve important economic problems contains the basis to challenge the utopian, schematic and objectivist blueprint view of socialist transition, which has previously been outlined in epochal terms:

“The class struggle can, in the last analysis, go in two directions, depending on the balance of forces inside and outside the country and the class policy being followed. It can go backwards to capitalism or it can advance towards communism.

“While socialism creates the objective basis for solving social contradiction, these contradictions need to be solved with a correct political line and the development of mass, active democracy. This is essential as communism is not a spontaneous development.”

However this attempt to arrive at a non-objectivist view of transition is undermined in two main theoretical terms. Firstly, the historic political commitment by the CPGB to oppose the ideology of socialism in one country still represents an ideological commitment to this idealist perspective. Socialism is considered an automatic effect of national revolution, in which the strategic importance of world revolution is reduced to that of the tempo of the chronological time scale of the national movement towards communism: “Socialism in Britain will start from a relatively high level of technique, output and culture. Once the hard task of winning working class state power has been achieved, we will advance directly towards communism. The speed of that advance is dictated by the completion of the world revolution and the correctness of the policy of the working class and its communist vanguard.” In other words, the particular dictatorship of the proletariat represents the necessary first stage and the telos and potentiality of the essence of world revolution. This atomistic standpoint, and the connected ideological accommodation to socialism in one country, represents an ontological adherence to the standpoint of uneven development, and the related denial of the possibility that a national proletarian revolution would still constitute a defeat in regards to the strategic perspective of simultaneous revolution.

Secondly, this concession to objectivist historical materialism is upheld by a philosophical view that the party represents the subject or telos of history: “The Communist Party differs from the rest of the working class only in that it has the advantage of a theory which enables it to understand the historical path and results of class struggle.” Thus the formal commitment to theory and scientific practice eclectically coexists with this non-reflective form of idealism, and the justification of a connected philosophy of history, in which the party is the guarantee of historical development regardless of objective obstacles and problems. This is why mention of a historical path becomes a mythical metaphor for the long and winding road towards inevitable success.

The tension between old and new

The draft programme has an overall problematical tendency towards reducing theoretical knowledge to the political acumen of developing transitional demands. Furthermore a conception of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism is still glossed over in regards to analysis of the opportunist degeneration of the CPGB. The call to develop a revolutionary programme is still not an adequate substitute for the theoretical tasks involved in outlining what constitutes the difference between reformist and revolutionary politics. This is an absence which politically defines the limitation of the draft programme. However the primary theoretical limitation is the failure to either develop a viable non-teleological historical materialist methodology for understanding social reality, and the lack of self-critical philosophical reflection upon the draft programme’s idealist tendencies. In this sense the leftovers of Stalinism are still contained in the draft programme. This is why we would urge the CPGB to seriously study the TUG Second Communist Manifesto as a constructive alternative to these forms of theoretical weakness. We will also be elaborating our view of transitional demands in our critique of the LRCI Trotskyist Manifesto.

Nonetheless despite these harsh criticisms the call for revolutionary regroupment around an open democratic centralist organisational stance cannot be easily dismissed. It provides the organisational and political basis for the TUG to try to win the CPGB away from left reformism and for revolutionary politics. We do not consider the reformed CPGB a necessary step forward for proletarian revolution, but rather it can become an integral part of the struggle for proletarian revolution if it enters into serious dialogue with the TUG in political, historical materialist and philosophical terms. On this basis we apply for representational entry into the CPGB.