10.10.2024

Formulations, fetishes and failures

Steve Bloom dogmatically clings to ‘new left Trotskyist’ orthodoxy, says Mike Macnair, and this leads him and his co-thinkers to strategic unrealism and abandoning working class political independence

With this third part of my reply to Steve Bloom’s criticism of Revolutionary strategy¹ we return from the questions of method and history, discussed in my last article, to questions of practical strategy. I begin with a point comrade Bloom makes quite briefly, but which is in my view absolutely fundamental: the “chain of revolutions” delusion, and its connection to the fetishism of the revolutionary moment discussed in my first article. I move from there into the way in which comrade Bloom’s (and that of the organised far left in general) fetishism of the revolutionary moment is an alternative to Marx’s and Engels’s strategic conception. In the far left (Bloom included) the wager is on ‘mass action’. In Marx and Engels, in contrast, it is the organised movement of the working class (warts and all) that offers the possibility of hope of escape from the infernal machine of capitalism.

International

Comrade Bloom argues:

Waiting for the conditions to exist for a continent-wide revolution before taking power in a single country is as impractical as waiting for world revolution. We do not have an on-off switch that controls the timing of revolutionary processes. If we fail to take advantage of the social crisis in country A that creates the potential for revolution, because we insist on waiting for a simultaneous opportunity in countries B, C and D, by the time the possibility is posed in country B the opportunity in country A will have disappeared.

We have no choice, therefore, except to proceed with the “chain of revolutions” approach. Its failure in Europe during the 1920s and 30s cannot properly cause us to conclude that such a development is impossible.

From here he proceeds to an aspect of his false methodological claims, which I addressed in my second article.² There is no point repeating what I said there, beyond the point that he seems to imagine I am generalising on the single case of the Russian experience, where in reality, I am arguing that the Russian experience fails to disprove the repeated failure of his strategic line elsewhere - not just in the 1920s and 1930s, but in every wave of revolutionary crises and near-revolutionary crises since the 1940s. He goes on: “The length of time the Russian working class could hold onto power in isolation was conditioned primarily by the economic backwardness of Russia in relation to other imperialist nations. This is a condition unique to this one revolutionary experience; it will never be duplicated again.”

This is plain nonsense. All the countries in which capitalism has been (temporarily) overthrown were colonies or semi-colonies, with the exception of the German Democratic Republic and the Czech part of Czechoslovakia;³ most of them were, like Russia itself, socially dominated by small peasant production. Further, Cuba, though heavily proletarianised, had a classic colonial economy based on a monoculture (sugar) for the imperial market, with subsidiary tourist, and related, businesses. Cuba thus exemplifies the fact that capitalism does not spread uniform development, but, on the contrary, the imperialist metropoles act to distort economic development in the colonial and semi-colonial periphery.

The result is that countries outside the imperialist centres will, if they attempt on their own to break with capitalism, suffer from the Russian experience of generalised shortage, leading to “all the old crap must revive” (Marx in The German ideology; Trotsky in The revolution betrayed).⁴

It has to be added that industrialised countries (and post-industrialised imperialist ones, like the UK) are more dependent on international trade. Germany came close to starvation under the British blockade in 1914-18; the UK imports 45% of the food it consumes, so that under sanctions we can expect at least 40% of the population to starve; Greece had to surrender to the ‘troika’ in 2015, because the country has not been self-sufficient in food since the 5th century BCE, so that autarkic ‘socialism’ in Greece would not survive even remotely as long as the Soviet regime.

Beyond these points, comrade Bloom offers only the argument, “… what can Mike say about the Cuban revolution, where a political form that I would characterise as the dictatorship of the proletariat (I hope Mike agrees) survived for decades after 1959, waiting for the revolution elsewhere in Latin America to come to its aid?”

I have responded to comrade Bloom on Cuba before, in my February 22 article:

… it is in my opinion clear that the ‘sectarian’ opponents of the USFI in 1963 (Healy, Lambert, Robertson, Wohlforth, etc), and the ‘official communists’ and Maoists, were both right (as against the USFI) in understanding that what was involved in Cuba was an extension of the ‘socialist bloc’, creating a regime of the same type, albeit a bit ‘softer’ than the USSR (as was also true of Yugoslavia): not a ‘third way’.⁵

In other words, I characterise the Cuban regime as no more a dictatorship of the proletariat than any of the other Soviet-bloc regimes (I think they all had a degree of connection with the proletariat, but none of them represented the class rule of the working class as a class over the state and the petty proprietors). And Cuba did not “survive for decades after 1959, waiting for the revolution elsewhere in Latin America to come to its aid”: it survived for decades after 1959 because the USSR did come to its aid.

Waves

In short, comrade Bloom’s arguments on this issue simply reassert the standard ‘new left’ Trotskyist dogma, and altogether fail to address my points. The importance of the issue means that it is worth quoting at length some of what I wrote about it in Revolutionary strategy, to which comrade Bloom gives no answer.

In the first place, at a very early stage in the book - criticising the ‘national roads’ approach of the centre tendency in the Second International - I wrote:

… what immediately followed [the publication of the Communist manifesto] (not, of course, as a result of the Manifesto) was the outbreak of an international revolutionary wave affecting France, Germany, Austria, Hungary.

Indeed, previous (bourgeois) revolutionary movements had also been international: the Europe-wide commune movement of the 12th and 13th centuries, 16th-17th century Protestantism (in particular Calvinism) and Enlightenment republicanism of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Future, more proletarian, revolutionary waves were also to be international in character, as in the rise of class struggles that led up to the 1914-18 war, those of the end and immediate aftermath of that war, the aftermath of 1945, and the late 1960s-early 1970s (p63).

I can add to this the short-lived wave of ‘squares’ protests and - most powerfully, albeit still not fully posing the question of workers’ power because of the prior weakness of the class movement - the ‘Arab spring’ of 2011.

I can go a bit further into depth on this point with some of what I wrote in response to Trotskyist critics elsewhere. Thus in 2007, in the last article of my series on ‘permanent revolution’ and the ‘transitional programme’,⁶ I wrote:

… the capitalist class is an international class and capitalist nation-states are not nationally autonomous entities. They are parts of an international hierarchical system of states, linked formally by treaty systems and in practice by international markets in state debt and in armaments. This state system is headed by a world-hegemon state (Britain to 1914; the US from 1945), whose armed forces are the ultimate guarantors of property rights globally and whose currency is, in consequence, the international reserve currency ….

Since the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is an international state system, not a series of fully independent nation-states, the proletariat can only expect to actually take political power - so as to hold it for more than a very short period - on a continental scale at minimum, and the seizure of power by the proletariat is therefore on the conjunctural agenda only when there is an acute crisis of the international state system as such ….

Within this framework, the seizure of power by the proletariat was posed conjuncturally when the international capitalist state order fell into acute crisis - that is, in 1914-20 and in 1939-48.

It was also, as it were, ‘half’-posed at three other periods: (a) by the generalised rise of the workers’ movement and strike struggles in the 1900s (the extreme point being the Russian revolutionary crisis of 1905); (b) in the later phase of the 1960s-70s rise in workers’ struggles (the extreme points being the French 1968, the 1974-76 Portuguese revolution, and revolutionary crises in several Latin American countries); and (c) by the global depression resulting from the 1929 crash (the extreme point being the Spanish revolution and civil war).

I say ‘half’-posed, because in the first two cases acute political crisis and mass class struggles did not involve an actual threat to the coherence of the armed forces of capitalist states generally. In the third case, the 1930s, the clear context was an offensive of capital against the workers’ movement (rise of fascism). It would only be in the event that military resistance of the workers’ movement inflicted a military defeat on the fascists and their allies within the state that this dynamic would have posed the question of workers’ power.⁷

In other words, I think it is utterly misleading to suppose that revolutionary crises mature in purely national frameworks. This idea of purely national roads to socialism (meaning by ‘socialism’ what immediately follows capitalism) is precisely one of the main elements in the politics that led the German, Austrian and Italian ‘centrists’ in the split in the Second International to refuse to reach for power, when the question of power was, in fact, posed on a European scale - in 1918-1920. The result was not to avoid civil war by waiting until the workers’ movement was stronger in their own country (as they hoped), but to defer a civil war the workers’ movement could have won into a later (and one-sided) civil war that the workers’ movement was bound to lose.

Single country

Secondly, I argue later in Revolutionary strategy that the international power of capital is sufficient to prevent any revolutionary regime in a single country appearing for any length of time as an attractive alternative to capitalism; without international action of the proletariat the new regime will inevitably be strangled:

Capitalism is from the beginning an international social formation, and the nation-state is, in relation to the world market, merely a firm. The state-firm retains liquidity by borrowing on financial markets. These, if they are national in form, are international in substance: this was already true of the 17th century Amsterdam and 18th century London financial markets. An attempt in a single country to break with capitalist rule - or even to significantly improve the position of the working class - will thus be met with withdrawal of credit by the capitalists, leading to an immediate crisis of state liquidity and more general economic dislocation.

If a socialist government responds by expropriations, the immediate effect is to break the incentive structure of the capitalist market in the country and increase economic dislocation. In addition, the response of international capital will then take the form of blockade and war. It thus becomes immediately necessary to move to generalised planning under economic autarky. This was the situation of the Bolsheviks in 1918-19; it has been repeated with varying results - usually the collapse of the socialist government - many times since.

The result is, in fact - as it was in the former tsarist empire - economic regression. Hence the socialist party loses its majority support and is forced - if it is to continue its course - to minority dictatorship and increasingly systematic repression. In countries that are not self-sufficient in food, energy and raw materials - ie, most advanced capitalist countries - the result would be mass starvation. The socialist government would collapse into a capitalist government far more rapidly than happened in Russia and China.

The exception that proves the rule is the outcome of World War II, the effects of which stretched down to the 1980s. The deep global crisis of British world hegemony, culminating in World War II, and the particular form which that war took, yielded the result that the USSR was massively strengthened, while remaining under bureaucratic rule. In the ensuing ‘cold war’ there could appear to be a series of ‘national revolutions’. But in reality these were possible because the countries involved (most clearly Cuba) were brought into and subsidised by the autarkic, bureaucratic ‘planning’ system of the Soviet regime. Equally, the US, now hegemonic over the capitalist countries, consciously encouraged social democratic and nationalist reform in capital’s front-line states as an instrument to secure them from being added to the ‘Soviet empire’: part of the policy of ‘containment’.

The offensive of the working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s destroyed the policy of containment and led the US to turn to a global policy of aggressive ‘roll-back of communism’ under the banner of ‘human rights’. The fall of the USSR has finally destroyed the foundations of the policy of concessions for the sake of containment. The exception is now over. It still proves the rule, because it was international events and dynamics - World War II and the cold war - that enabled the supposedly ‘national’ revolutions and reforms. Capitalism is an international system and it is international events and movements that enable radical change in individual nation-states. (pp137-38)

Trigger?

I also argued against the idea that the Russian Revolution as a national revolution triggered the European revolution. Rather, it could appear as a trigger because of the prior development of working class international unity through the Second International:

Far from the Russian Revolution triggering the European revolution, the European war triggered the Russian Revolution. The central European national movements then proved to be a bulwark first of German, then of Entente, policy against the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution did, at one remove, trigger revolutionary movements in Hungary, Germany and Italy. It did so not by the route envisaged by Marx and Engels, that the removal of fear of Russian intervention in central Europe would open the way to a revolutionary movement which would spill westwards. Nor did it do so by the route projected by Trotsky in Results and prospects, that the Russian Revolution would spill over into Germany and/or trigger a collapse of the London and Paris financial markets. Rather, the perception of the revolution as a workers’ revolution triggered an international radicalisation of the workers’ movement. This radicalisation reached its highest points in the countries which could not see themselves as victors in the war: Germany, Austria-Hungary and (in a slightly different way) Italy. Advanced workers in these countries saw a possibility of workers’ revolution as a result of 1917. They could see this possibility because of the prior symbolic international unity of the workers’ movement in the form of the pre-war Second International.

At first, October 1917 seemed to show that the working class could take power. This image promoted revolutionary attempts elsewhere. But the impulse rapidly ebbed. As disturbing news began to filter west, even Luxemburg, in prison, was hesitant. As the character of the Soviet regime was rendered more explicit in the theses of the 1920 and 1921 Comintern congresses, the ban on factions and the Kronstadt events, the majority of the existing militant left activists of the workers’ movement in western Europe took their distance from the Bolsheviks. This was reflected in the 1921 splits from the Comintern of both the larger part of those among the left of the Kautskyan centre who had flirted with it and the ‘left communists’ (larger then than they later became).

These splits foreshadowed the future: the nature of the Soviet regime was to become a primary political obstacle to any attempt of the working class to take power into its own hands in western Europe, and ultimately to international class-political consciousness more generally (pp141-42).

I can add to this that it is important to be clear that - in spite of the debates about ‘socialism in one country’ - the Russian Revolution was not limited by the boundaries of a single country, nor by self-determination treated as a principle. The civil war of 1918‑21 involved the reconquest by main force of the large bulk of the colonial possessions of the former tsarist empire, most of which had in 1918 elected to secede. If it had not done so, it is perfectly clear that the Reds would have gone down to military defeat. This was a continental revolution - but, even so, without enough forces of production in its own territory to avoid being strangled over the long term by British, and later US, sanctions.

I do not wholly exclude the possibility that it will be necessary to gamble on revolution in a single country and hope that our local revolutionary crisis will turn out to be the first swallow of spring. As I wrote in 2007 in response to Trotskyist critics,

We may in an acute crisis in the future wind up having to gamble against long odds in this way. That is, we may be faced, as the Bolsheviks were, with the choice between a gamble on the international workers’ movement and lying down to be shot in a rightist military coup. But our task now is not to promote the idea of a gamble (= a repeat of 1917/revolution in a single country). It is to promote the means by which the odds can be shortened: the international unity of the working class.

Hence, what is needed is to fight now for the international unity and common action of the working class as a class and the workers’ movement as a class movement under capitalism. This line is counterposed to the common far-left practices of (1) political concessions to nationalist ‘realism’ on immigration controls, etc, for the sake of formal unity with left Labourites; (2) little-British (in reality Atlanticist) calls for withdrawal from the European Union, and (3) abandoning solidarity with the workers’ movement in ‘third world’ countries attacked by imperialism for the sake of an illusory ‘anti-imperialist’ alliance with nationalist, Islamist, etc reactionaries.⁸

It should, I hope, be clear from these extended quotations that comrade Bloom’s argument for the “chain of revolutions” approach is merely dogmatic, and does not address my actual arguments against this approach, which I have just repeated.

It should also be clear that what is central to comrade Bloom’s argument is the claim that “If we fail to take advantage of the social crisis in country A that creates the potential for revolution, because we insist on waiting for a simultaneous opportunity in countries B, C and D, by the time the possibility is posed in country B the opportunity in country A will have disappeared.” In other words, this argument is merely a variant form of the fetish of the revolutionary crisis and “seizing the moment”, which I criticised in my first article responding to comrade Bloom.⁹

Moment

Where does the far left’s fetishism of the revolutionary moment - both at the expense of the prolonged period of preparatory work that has to precede it and at the expense the objective aims that have to be posed so that it makes sense (political democracy, continental and international common action) - come from?

There are three elements. The first is the problem of the overthrow of the state, which the far left insists requires an insurrectionary general strike. The second is the standard historical narratives of the Russian Revolution and of the split in the Second International. The third, and most fundamental, is the far left’s loss of the understanding of why Marxism as such insists on the dictatorship of the proletariat and on the struggle for the actually existing, warts-and-all, workers’ movement under capitalism, as essential to getting beyond capitalism.

The first point appears in comrade Bloom’s August 1 article. In his original criticism of the US Marxist Unity Group’s supposed ‘schematism’ in focussing on the constitution, he conceded that an electoral route was a possible route to revolutionary change, but insisted also on the alternative possibilities of the “‘dual power’ theoretical approach to establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat” and on a third alternative: “the direct military conquest of power. This was the road followed by the Chinese and the Cuban revolutions.”¹⁰ This is the route called by Maoists ‘prolonged people’s war’. In his August 1 article, both the possibility of electoral victory and ‘prolonged people’s war’ disappear, and the character of the state as a coercive apparatus and the fact that it intervenes in elections mean that the only road to its overthrow is the mass strike and workers’ councils:

… if we are going to ‘smash up’ the existing state, we need a mechanism to do so. That mechanism can only be a mobilised mass movement, armed for self-defence against the existing military and police forces (and any new armed force created by the counterrevolution) - a mass movement that is also capable of making deep inroads into the consciousness of these existing repressive forces and thus neutralising them, to the greatest possible degree, as a tool to be used against the revolution. As noted above, this mobilised mass movement is also at its height during the days or weeks that a mass strike is taking place.

It is comrade Bloom who is the schematist here. Comrade Bloom quotes in his August 1 article an email from me to him. I argue there that it is first necessary to build up the workers’ movement under capitalism on the basis of democratic functioning, so that “when the existing state falls into crisis, there is a large minority already existing which can think of socialist collective action as an alternative way of making decisions, and hence possibly running society”. Then:

It is perfectly possible that the form of the crisis will start with a left victory in a general election, or with a military mutiny, or with OTT repression in response to minor terrorist activity triggering a radical loss of legitimacy and collapse of the state, as in Ireland in 1918 and Cuba in 1958-59; or whatever. (It can also start with military defeat in a war, which is the essence of Russia 1917 and Germany and Austria 1918-19 underneath the superficial appearances.) It does not have to take the form of the mass strike.

It is also false to suppose that the resolution of the crisis has to take the form of the insurrectionary general strike. October 1917 in Petrograd notoriously involved fewer casualties than the making of Eisenstein’s film about it: because it was a police action by armed forces units loyal to the Petrograd Military-Revolutionary Committee, following on the electoral shift in the political composition of the soviets over August-October 1917. The decisive question is splitting the armed forces; and this is, in turn, a question of winning mass political support.

The second issue is the standard historians’ narratives. I have referred before to Lars T Lih’s work on this issue. Lih shows that standard narratives of Lenin’s genius start with the factional writing of 1924. I add that, as I have argued before, the line that the only real choice was between “wrong but wromantic” [sic] Luxemburg and Trotsky, and “right but repulsive” Bernstein, Ebert and Noske, was a construct created by cold-war-period historians who served in Anglo-American intelligence services at the end of World War II - Peter Nettl, Carl Schorske, Leo Valiani, Leonard Schapiro, and so on - and serves the interest of the capitalist state in tying the workers’ movement to ‘safe’ forms of protest.¹¹

Other layers

The third and most fundamental point is the issue of the class perspective. Comrade Bloom writes:

Mike and I agree regarding the class character of any revolutionary struggle that is actually going to lead to the emancipation of the peasantry, oppressed nationalities, women, etc. I note, however, that this correct overall understanding has generated a demonstrable historical tendency within the revolutionary workers’ movement: to actively subordinate struggles by other oppressed social layers to working class revolution, expecting such struggles to wait until the working class is victorious, or limit demands to those which are deemed compatible with a working class agenda. This is a tendency we must actively repudiate in my judgment.

This is just a standard Eurocommunist argument against the class perspective - that the struggles of “other oppressed social layers” must not be “subordinated” or made to “wait” or “limit their demands”. This is the late 20th century version of popular frontism. The class perspective is formally ‘conceded’ in the first sentence, but immediately denied as far as practical politics is concerned. As I have argued elsewhere, the practical consequence of this sort of politics in the USA is the phenomenon of ‘Vote Clinton, get Trump’ and as a consequence Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court of the US, so self-defeating; in the UK, the political helplessness of the Corbynistas in face of the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign.¹²

Lying behind this is a fundamental misunderstanding of why the workers’ movement is central to the Marxist perspective. The question is, what is the source of hope for a positive escape from the capitalist dynamics that are driving towards world war, ecological catastrophe, and so on?

The answer is that, in order to overcome capitalist dynamics, we need to move to cooperative collaboration, on the basis of politically democratic decision-making. The basis of hope is, then, that the working class as a class is driven by its situation towards organised cooperation - in trade unions, in cooperatives, mutuals, workers’ collectivist political projects, and so on.

It is thus the organised workers’ movement, and the potential to organise that points the way to a possible socialist future; not the episode of strike or street action; nor, on a larger scale, the revolutionary crisis merely as a crisis and a ‘mass mobilisation’.

In contrast, the small proprietors - peasants, small businesses, self-employed professionals, intelligentsy, and official and managerial bureaucrats - have individual ‘turf’ interests, which their class position drives them to defend both against outsiders and against each other. Marx demonstrates in part one of Capital that capitalism grows out of this logic of competition among the small proprietors. In The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte he shows that this logic of petty-proprietor individualism also throws up the ‘man on horseback’: the Bonapartist state.

For the workers’ movement to subordinate itself to strategic alliance with the “other oppressed social layers”, which means oppressed sections of the upper and middle classes, is then both to subordinate itself, in reality, to political representation of capital, just as the ‘popular front’ always did, and to obliterate the grounds for hope in generalised human emancipation that arise from the distinctive situation of the proletariat as a class.

Present global dynamics are pretty bleak. But the workers’ class movement still offers the potential of a way out - if we can only overcome the ties of managerialism, popular frontism and ‘national road’ ideas.

1. Also in three parts: ‘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. ‘Analysis of historical causes’ Weekly Worker October 3 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1509/analysis-of-historical-causes).↩︎

3. Slovakia was an internal colony; the Czech area was part of the industrial core of Austria-Hungary before World War I; Czechoslovakia in the inter-war period was a middle-rank capitalist state subsidised as an Entente front-line country.↩︎

4. T Carver and D Blank (eds) Marx and Engels’s ‘German ideology’ manuscripts New York 2005, p97: “all the old shit would have to be re-established”; The revolution betrayed New York 1972, p56: “all the old crap must revive”.↩︎

5. ‘Deal with the arguments’ Weekly Worker February 22 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1479/deal-with-the-arguments).↩︎

6. Linked at communistuniversity.uk/mike-macnair-programme-and-party-articles.↩︎

7. ‘Leading workers by the nose’ Weekly Worker September 12 2007 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/688/leading-workers-by-the-nose).↩︎

8. ‘Defeat was fault of enemy machine guns’ Weekly Worker May 24 2007 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/674/defeat-was-fault-of-enemy-machine-guns).↩︎

9. ‘Fetishising revolutionary crisis’ Weekly Worker September 26 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1508/fetishising-revolutionary-crisis).↩︎

10. cosmonautmag.com/2023/12/the-struggle-for-a-democratic-socialist-republic-and-the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat (towards the end of the text).↩︎

11. ‘Containing our movement in “safe” forms’ Weekly Worker September 12 2019 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1266/containing-our-movement-in-safe-forms).↩︎

12. ‘Intersectionalism, the highest stage of western Stalinism?’ Critique Vol 46 (2018), pp541-58 (preprint available at ora.ox.ac.uk).↩︎