WeeklyWorker

03.10.2024
David Hume: his Tory philosophical scepticism matches Bloom’s version of Trotskyism

Analysis of historical causes

We must ruthlessly criticise all past attempts. As Mike Macnair once again demonstrates, Steve Bloom’s arguments on method and history only give support to dogmatism and personality cults

This is the second part of my response to Steve Bloom’s recent series criticising my book Revolutionary strategy.1 The first part addressed his offer of ‘synthesis’, meaning his demand for acceptance of the mass-strike strategy for revolution. This part addresses questions of historical method and historical substance, and their implications for the idea of a party. A third article will address internationalism, and return to the most fundamental question: the class perspective, and the grounds for hope that we can escape the infernal machine of capitalism.

On the historical questions, the starting point is the question of method and the use of hindsight. It is necessary to repeat a quotation from Revolutionary strategy, which comrade Bloom gives in a partial form in his second article (August 29):

The second general point is that this book from beginning to end attempts to discuss the history of the movement’s strategic ideas with the benefit of hindsight. For example, later in the book when I criticise the arguments and decisions of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, I do not intend by this to pass some sort of moral judgment on the decisions they took under extremely difficult circumstances.

I do not even necessarily mean that any superior alternative was open to them. For example, I said above that October 1917 was a gamble on revolution in western Europe, which failed. But the alternative to this gamble put forward by Martov and Kautsky - a Menshevik-SR government based on the Constituent Assembly - was unreal: the real alternative available was either the policy the Bolsheviks actually followed, including the coercion of the peasantry to supply food, ‘red terror’, and so on, or a government of the ‘White’ generals and ‘White terror’. The problem here is not the actions the Bolsheviks took: it is their over-theorisation of these actions, which has been inherited by the modern far left.

The use of hindsight is justifiable and necessary, because the point of the whole exercise is to study history for what it can tell us about where we are now, how we got here and where we should (try to) go next. In this sense it is loosely analogous to the sort of exercise that has to be undertaken if a bridge falls down. Why did the bridge fall down? If it was hit by a meteorite, we may well rebuild it in exactly the same form. But, if the collapse was caused by problems which will predictably recur in future (like severe storms or an increased weight of traffic), we should redesign the bridge, in the light of hindsight, to meet these problems. The fact that the problems which caused the collapse may not have been originally predictable affects the moral responsibility of the original designers, but it does not in the least alter our present tasks (pp23-24).

Comrade Bloom quotes the third paragraph of this passage without the first two. The effect is that he says (his fifth bullet point) that “Mike does not place a moral blame on those who held onto power in the USSR after 1921 … But he does hold them politically responsible. That is much the same thing in my judgment.” But, when the first two paragraph of the passage are quoted, it is plain that it is not “much the same thing”. I say nothing about holding the Bolshevik leaders “politically responsible”. I say merely that trying to repeat 1917 or clinging to the texts of the first four congresses of Comintern is not good strategy today, given what we now know.

Selective again

Another selective quotation. I wrote:

Once we recognise that this is true, we can no longer treat the strategy of Bolshevism, as it was laid out in the documents of the early Comintern, as presumptively true; nor can we treat the several arguments made against the Bolsheviks’ course of action by Kautsky, Martov and Luxemburg (among others) as presumptively false. I stress presumptively. In relation to each and every element of Bolshevik strategy there may be independent reasons to accept it; in relation to each and every argument of Kautsky, etc there may be independent reasons to reject it. But the ‘victory of the Russian Revolution’ on its own, or the course of the revolution after late 1917-early 1918, can no longer be taken as evidence for Bolshevik strategy as a package. What it led to was not a strategic gain for the world working class, but a 60-year impasse of the global workers’ movement and the severe weakness of this movement at the present date (p14).

Comrade Bloom quotes only the last two sentences of this passage. The effect of the cut is the same as that for the first passage quoted: that is, it makes me appear to categorically reject the Russian Revolution as such. He goes on after this quotation to argue that I would have urged Europeans not to colonise North America on the basis of initial English failures, and that I would have urged Haitian slaves not to revolt in 1791. In the first case I am not sufficiently favourable to European colonisation of North America to be willing to engage with the claim.

The second is a plain falsehood. It is transparent that the French Revolution of 1789 created a situation in which the slave-owners of Saint-Domingue could not go on in the old way, and the semi-proletarianised slaves (semi-proletarianised because their work was characterised by factory-like, coordinated productive activity) were unwilling to go on in the old way.2 At the end of the day, the revolution in Haiti resolved into a bourgeois revolution, which displayed the same dynamic (from republicanism to a new bourgeois Bonapartism/monarchism) as the French Revolution, of which it was part. The disastrous long-term outcome is a variant on the usual effects of semi-colonial status, with the superadded negative effects of US state revanchism. But this would not be a reason not to rise up to overthrow slavery.

And, as I said explicitly about the Russian Revolution in the part of the passage comrade Bloom did not quote,

… the real alternative available [in Russia] was either the policy the Bolsheviks actually followed, including the coercion of the peasantry to supply food, ‘red terror’, and so on, or a government of the ‘White’ generals and ‘White terror’. The problem here is not the actions the Bolsheviks took: it is their over-theorisation of these actions, which has been inherited by the modern far left.

Marx in The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte wrote:

… proletarian revolutions, like those of the 19th century, constantly criticise themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals - until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible …3

Comrade Bloom’s objection to my use of hindsight to abandon conclusions reached by the Russian revolutionaries is the rejection of Marx’s conception of proletarian revolutions in this passage as “constantly criticis[ing] themselves” and “derid[ing] with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts”. His method is to refuse such criticism, on the basis that we have insufficient evidence to criticise the views of the early Comintern.

Physics envy

In support of this argument against Marx, comrade Bloom attacks my (explicitly loose) analogy with a bridge that falls down. He offers four bullet points about (20th-21st century) engineering in support of this attack: there is most likely a single identifiable design flaw in the bridge, but there are “multiple and interconnecting” factors in revolutionary defeat. Second, bridge design is controlled and revolution is not. Third, steel girders are all identical, but countries are different. Fourth, when we construct a bridge we can plan the intended outcome; not so of revolutions. Hence, comrade Bloom argues, “any conclusions we draw about future expectations/actions [from hindsight] must be far more qualified”.

These are merely examples of ‘physics envy’ arguments, resting on the point that we cannot attain the degree of probability in our political or historical judgments that can be attained by 20th-21st century experimental methods in physics and related disciplines.4 This is, of course, true. I have added “20th-21st century” to the formulation because several of comrade Bloom’s claims about civil engineering would only be true of the 20th to 21st century: bridge-builders of the 19th century or before had to work with considerably more approximation, for example, on the uniformity of steel girders, or on the possible multiplicity of causes of failure).

This small point pulls at a loose thread in the knitting of comrade Bloom’s argument: it is, in reality, a much larger point. Scientific method is in origin a formalisation of the lower-level ‘suck it and see’ or ‘trial and error’ practised by medieval and early modern artisans. The mathematical precision aspect was already present in Ptolemaic astronomy: what happens in the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th century is that it becomes acceptable for very approximate reports of observations, experiments and new medical treatments to defeat the long-established doctrines of Aristotle (384-22 BCE) Claudius Ptolemy (approximately 100‑170 CE) or Galen of Pergamon (129-216 CE).

Foundational to this development - that the authorities can be overturned by observation and experiment - is the recognition that, though complete certainty is not attainable,5 in what medievals and early moderns called the ‘sublunary sphere’ (the part of the world we can actually affect) we are entitled and obliged to act on the basis of probabilities. Following from this, in human decision-making presumptions (inferences from the common course of events) and ideas of the burden of proof and the standard of proof are as unavoidable outside judicial procedures as they are within them.6 Indeed, the mere fact that they are unavoidable in judicial procedures should be enough to lead us to reject ‘physics envy’ demands for physics-like levels of certainty before we act in social matters.

‘Physics envy’ has a political and a class content. It is a dilute form of David Hume’s critique of induction and general scepticism: it is, like Hume, a denial of the legitimacy of individuals making their own political choices on the basis of imperfect evidence, rather than deferring to authority. And Hume’s scepticism had a political purpose: it was the conceptual foundation for the anti-revolutionary politics of his The history of England from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the revolution in 1688 (six volumes, 1754-61), which, in turn, became a charter text for French anti-revolutionary politics and for Burkean conservatism.7

The class aspect of Humean scepticism and ideas derived under it should appear from the deployment of these ideas by conservative writers opposed to the lower orders getting out of hand: thus the late 18th and early 19th century British writers discussed in Don Herzog’s Poisoning the minds of the lower orders and the early 19th century Virginia slaveocrat writers discussed in Dickson D Bruce’s The rhetoric of conservatism.8

The point is that the rejection of decision-making on probabilities, of artisanal trial-and-error, and of self-criticising earlier endeavours implies, on the one hand, that every cook cannot govern, because the artisanal trial and error decision process is insufficient for political decision-making, so that the workers should subordinate themselves to the specialists.

And, on the other hand, it implies that existing textual authority is protected from refutation, whether this existing textual authority is to be Aristotle, Ptolemy or Galen, or the Bible, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican church, or some other sacred text. Or - and here we come back to comrade Bloom - Rosa Luxemburg’s The mass strike or the texts of the first four congresses of Comintern, to be treated as sacred texts, because to disprove them requires evidence to physics standards.

In this context, comrade Bloom claims that “Mike draws absolute and sweeping generalisations from his hindsight, which are completely unwarranted”, while, on the other hand, he claims that we can “generalise … useful lessons for the future” of a positive kind from the Russian experience. Remember, that I claim only that “the ‘victory of the Russian Revolution’ on its own, or the course of the revolution after late 1917-early 1918, can no longer be taken as evidence for Bolshevik strategy as a package” (emphases added). So I do, in fact, think that there are positive as well as negative lessons of the Russian Revolution; I merely deny that 1917-21 proves the Comintern ‘package’.

The reality is that what I claim is that repeated failures of mass strike movements to create the conditions for the creation of workers’ power - starting in Germany and Austria in 1918-19 and the 1919-20 Biennio Rosso in Italy, but repeated many times - and repeated failures of the ‘new left’ since 1960 to achieve more than ephemeral spectaculars, or small bureaucratic-centralist sects, mean that we need to reconsider radically both mass-strikism, and the claims of the first four congresses of Comintern. And I argue that the eventual failure of the Russian Revolution and, in particular, the fact that there could be no serious resistance to the restoration of capitalism in 1989‑91, besides being fundamental to the present weakness of the left, also means that the Russian Revolution cannot legitimately be interpreted as evidence for the success of the mass-strike strategy sufficient to outweigh the very repeated evidence of its failure elsewhere.

Dogma

Comrade Bloom’s claims on the question of method in relation to the use of hindsight are, then, flatly wrong, and amount to a form of philosophical scepticism in the service of dogma. The difference is the particular dogma that is being protected by the scepticism: Toryism in Hume, Trotskyism in Bloom.

Given that I reject completely comrade Bloom’s objections to the use of hindsight, most of his substantive points about the history can merely be dismissed as simple applications of his false claims about method. Thus what he has to say about soviets is merely argument of this sort, and disregards not only the non-Russian evidence of failure, but also Trotsky’s polemics against fetishism of soviets in Lessons of October and in his writings on the Spanish revolution.9 The same is true of what comrade Bloom says about the formation of Comintern. I say, perfectly clearly in chapter 5 of the book, that the split in the Second International was justified and cannot be undone - but that some (not all) of the reasons offered for it were wrong and have poisoned the communist left.

Similarly on the question of government (the end of his second article, and under the subhead, ‘Method’, point a, in his third): it is comrade Bloom, not I, who misunderstands what is in the Comintern resolutions; and the experience of history with left minority participation in governments hoped to be ‘transitional’ shows that Comintern’s ideas here were false.

It is convenient at this point to observe merely that I do not accept comrade Bloom’s observations in his third article, subhead ‘Definitions’, on “minimum programme” and “Kautskyism”. On “minimum programme”, comrade Bloom says that “the same term was first used in a different sense … to mean a programme that would limit itself to bourgeois-democratic demands” (emphasis added). Since I have shown that it was first used by Marx and others of the 1880 Programme of the Parti Ouvrier, which certainly does not make such a limit, I think that it is positively useful today to correct the errors of the early 20th century socialists on the issue. On “Kautskyism” it might be better to substitute ‘Bebelism’, since Bebel was the primary architect of the SPD approach.10 But it would clearly be false to concede anything to the modern far left’s use of “Kautskyism” in the service of the personality cult of Lenin and the effort to downplay the influence of “Kautsky when he was a Marxist” on Bolshevism. Again what is involved is comrade Bloom’s assertion of Trotskyism as dogma - here by demanding ‘Trotskyist’ verbal usages.

I did not discuss the Trotskyists’ interpretation of ‘permanent revolution’ and its relation to ‘transitional programme’ in Revolutionary strategy, because I had when the book was published recently written for the Weekly Worker a separate series of articles on the issue: ‘“Transitional” to what?’ (August 2 2007), ‘What is workers’ power?’ (August 9), ‘For a minimum programme!’ (August 30), ‘Spontaneity and Marxist theory’ (September 6) and ‘Leading workers by the nose’ (September 13). (I list these here rather than in a footnote because footnotes are often easily overlooked.) I see no reason in comrade Bloom’s third article (subhead ‘Blind alleys’) to change my views on this issue, since he offers - again - merely dogmatic reassertion of the common coin of the late 20th century Trotskyist left.

On the points of more substance, the first is the claim that I assert an “expiration date” for the Russian Revolution; and, conversely, comrade Bloom claims:

The power of the mass mobilisation that had been central to the Russian Revolution itself in 1917 … remained alive through the 1920s and 30s, even the 40s and 50s, when the generation that made the revolution was alive and very much a factor in social life. I would suggest that this power was still alive even until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, though in a weaker and weaker form as time passed.

History

Comrade Bloom argues here that the positive effects of the mass mobilisation of 1917 persist down to 1989, albeit at decreasing levels, and denies my claim that Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 and Poland 1980-82 showed the inability of the proletariat (lacking a party) to pose a political alternative. Against this, I argue (1) that the idea of prolonged, persistent effects of a mass mobilisation after it has ebbed is a fantasy (when do we ever see it outside this context?); and (2) that, if we actually look at the events, we see processes of radicalisation in a rightward direction - more clearly in Poland than in Czechoslovakia, and more clearly in Czechoslovakia, where ‘economic reform’ was very prominent, than in Hungary, where it was already present.

“Give me the victory of the Spanish revolution,” says comrade Bloom, and “the entire history of the world … would almost certainly have turned out differently.” Maybe. Maybe because Spain, though sub-imperialist, would not have contributed industrial power to the Soviet problem of isolation: rather, it would (like Cuba later) have needed Soviet subsidy. But leave that aside.

Step two: why did the Spanish revolution fail? The main reason is that Spain lacked the independent arms manufacturing capacity needed to defeat the army rebels and their backers from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; and the UK insisted on a blockade of arms supplies to Spain, which it enforced on France by diplomatic threats to align with Nazi Germany. At this level, the essential condition of the victory of the Spanish revolution was the overthrow of the British state.

Secondarily, the constitutionalist, popular front policy of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Partido Comunista de España (PCE), the anarchist-led Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) trade union confederation, and the broad-far-left Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista meant that the government did not encourage peasant land seizures, which might have undermined the Franquist army.11 In this context, the USSR as much as the Spanish Frente Popular government was seeking alliance with the ‘western democracies’ and, as well as the PCE’s commitment to the Frente Popular, deployed Soviet GPU operatives to suppress leftist opposition.12 At this level, the essential condition of the victory of the Spanish revolution was the overthrow of the Stalinist regime in the USSR.

Trotsky’s comment in January 1931 was: “For a successful solution of all these tasks [of the Spanish revolution], three conditions are required: a party; once more a party; again a party.”13 When he wrote this, Trotsky imagined that the PCE could be that party. By May 1937 it was clear beyond any doubt that it could not be, and also that the POUM could not be.

“In the 1920s and 30s,” says comrade Bloom, “there were revolutionary events in Germany, France, Britain, Italy and elsewhere.” We should consider only the cases of Germany, France and Britain, for the reason given above: to overcome the problems of the USSR required the victory of the proletariat in one of the central imperialist, industrialised powers.

In Britain, the mutinies and police strikes of 1918-19 might have led to a revolutionary crisis if there had already been “a party; once more a party; again a party”. But the CPGB was not created until July 1920 and remained on the scale of the modern British far left. The 1926 general strike was not a “revolutionary event”: it was far from being true that the ruling class could not go on in the old way, and the trade union leadership collapsed politically in only nine days. In France, the 1920 general strike was a catastrophic defeat: though the workers’ movement revived, by the time of the 1936 Front Populaire the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) was already playing the role of restoring capitalist order; the Trotskyists were split into two groups, of no more than hundreds.

In Germany, there was a real revolution (overthrow of the Kaiser-Reich) and deep instability in 1918‑23. But the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Spartacus) formed in December 1918-January 1919 was small and very ultra-left, and the mass Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (VKPD) was only created in November 1920. The ‘March Action’ in 1921 decisively defeated the VKPD; Trotsky’s belief that there was a missed opportunity for the VKPD to take power in autumn 1923 was a self-deception.14 To make his analogy with the Russian October work, we would have to imagine that the Provisional Government in August-September 1917 agreed a ceasefire with Germany with a view to a separate peace, in which case ‘October’ could not have won; or, conversely, that Gustav Streseman’s government in Germany from August 1923 continued, rather than abandoned, Wilhelm Cuno’s policy of hyperinflation and ‘passive resistance’ against the French in the Rhineland - in which case there might have been a KPD-led revolution.

Bonaparte

A further level of causation is the question of Brest-Litovsk and its consequences. Comrade Bloom asserts that the fact the Reds won the civil war shows that they had a majority.15 This mass support was, however, in my opinion support constructed after the outbreak of civil war on a new basis: that is, that the Reds became a collective Bonaparte or ‘man on horseback’ - a representative-master of the peasantry that represented the peasants’ struggle against the White armies by mastering the peasants through grain expropriations. This collective-Bonaparte character - that the peasantry as a class naturally throws up absolute monarchy as its representative-master - is in my opinion the social basis that is reflected in the necessity to adopt military centralism in the party at the same period.

As far as the perceptions of the broad workers’ vanguard outside Russia were concerned, what was created - and overtly theorised at the Second Congress of Comintern - was party dictatorship over both proletariat and peasantry. This theorisation in my view underlies the inability of the communist parties to make the united front policy work: the overtheorisation meant that they could not offer either party or soviet democracy.

The problem, then, is comrade Bloom’s refusal of the analysis of historical causes, in the name of the belief that better outcomes were possible. Possible, I agree. But low-probability. We need to proceed from the starting point that, first, in any revolutionary crisis the trade union, social democratic and ‘official communist’ leaderships will play a scab role. The large preponderance of the historical evidence - starting with Germany 1918-19 and going down to Egypt in 2011-13 - is that the absence of a serious party before the outbreak of crisis cannot be made up for during crisis.

The refusal of causal connections appears again in his third article, subhead ‘Method’, point (c), where he argues that we cannot treat the ideas of the Comintern after Lenin’s death as having any historical continuity with Comintern ideas during Lenin’s life. But this is personality-cult politics. It cannot explain why the Left and United Oppositions lost in 1923-29, because it evades the elements of continuity both in policy (the smychka) and in institutional arrangements (military centralism from 1919 on) that helped the bureaucracy to win.

This last point brings us back to the modern far left, as in my first article. As Lars T Lih’s supplement, ‘A hundred years is enough’ (Weekly Worker September 19), argues, the Trotskyist analysis of the Russian Revolution is within the framework of the personality cult of Lenin, constructed around the time of his death. As to the fate of the revolution, the Trotskyists merely make a cult of the personality of Trotsky succeed within the framework of the cult of the personality of Lenin.

And, because it is personality-cult politics, this aspect of ‘anti-Stalinism’ inevitably supports the personality cults of so many petty Maoist and Trotskyist caudillos round the world. Without overcoming the method involved in the cult of Lenin, we can never escape from the world of small groups, organised round the cults of Healy, Cliff, Grant-Woods, Taaffe, Barnes, Avakian, Lambert, Posadas, Moreno … (the list is endless).

  1. ‘In search of a synthesis’ Weekly Worker August 1 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1502/in-search-of-a-synthesis); ‘Historical and methodological differences’, August 29 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1504/historical-and-methodological-differences); ‘Matters past and present’, September 12 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1506/matters-past-and-present).↩︎

  2. Cannot and will not: a shortened version of Lenin’s formulation on the nature of revolutionary crisis, from 1913 (www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/15.htm); 1915 (www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/ii.htm); and 1920 (www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch09.htm).↩︎

  3. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.↩︎

  4. Googling ‘physics envy’ produces 4.85 million results.↩︎

  5. Even in mathematics: this is the significance of Russell’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and Turing on the limits of computation: the high level of abstraction and hence generality of mathematics makes it appear to be true a priori, but it is ultimately inductively grounded.↩︎

  6. B Shapiro Probability and certainty in 17th century England Princeton NJ 1983, and her subsequent work - especially Beyond reasonable doubt and probable cause Berkeley CA 1991, and A culture of fact: England 1550-1700 Ithaca NY 2000; and my own review of the latter book, American Journal of Legal History Vol 44, (2000) pp445-46; on the relation to historical method and politics more generally, see my outline discussion in ‘The Tory interpretation’ Weekly Worker January 31 2019 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1236/the-tory-interpretation).↩︎

  7. DW Livingston, ‘David Hume and the conservative tradition’ (2014): isi.org/david-hume-and-the-conservative-tradition; L Bongie David Hume: prophet of the counterrevolution Carmel IN 2000.↩︎

  8. Herzog: Princeton NJ 1998; Bruce: San Marino CA 1982.↩︎

  9. Lessons of October chapter 8: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lessons/ch8.htm. ‘Spain: on the slogan of Soviets’ (1931): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/spain/spain09.htm.↩︎

  10. A point I make in the introduction to B Lewis and M Zurowski Karl Kautsky on colonialism London 2013, p8.↩︎

  11. “Might” because land tenure relations in 1930s Spain were substantially different to those in 1917 Russia: S Basco, J Domènech and L Maravall, ‘Land reform and rural conflict: evidence from 1930s Spain’ Explorations in Economic History Vol 89 (July 2023): www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498323000244.↩︎

  12. There is a convenient summary account at www.marxists.org/subject/spain/1987/richard-price.htm.↩︎

  13. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/spain/spain04.htm.↩︎

  14. See johnriddell.com/2021/12/01/the-german-october-of-1923-a-failed-bid-for-workers-power. This gives a good deal of detail and no reasons to believe that the failure was merely one of not ‘seizing the moment’; August Thalheimer, introduced by Mike Jones: www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/missed/index.htm.↩︎

  15. This disregards the literature I cited for the point; it is legitimate to reject such evidence by offering counter-arguments, but not to disregard it. Add to these references A Rabinowitch The Bolsheviks in power Bloomington IN 2007, chapters 8-11.↩︎