07.11.2024

Wars and slogans

Accepting, or adapting to, left-syndicalist excuses not to openly engage with our ideas is not the road to principled unity, argues Mike Macnair

We continue the discussion on the Provisional Central Committee’s statement on the danger of the Ukraine war escalating into World War III, and comrade Carla Roberts’ criticisms of this statement and the alternative proposed by several comrades. It is now ‘my turn’ to respond, because comrade Roberts’ article, ‘Different times, different slogans’, deployed some arguments from my book Revolutionary strategy against comrade Jack Conrad’s article and the PCC statement.¹ What follows is merely my views, not the common views of the PCC.

It is clear that Donald Trump has won the US presidential election - as we thought very possible in our discussions at our October 27 aggregate. This throws up in the air the question of US policy towards the war in Ukraine. And the impending election has already taken off the immediate agenda the immediate threat of escalation towards World War III through the use of European medium-range missiles to attack 1991-2014 Russian territory. By doing so, it has removed the immediacy of the PCC statement. Our purpose in that statement was, as comrade Conrad has put it, to “ring the alarm bell” about the dangers of the war in Ukraine, addressing a left which has been radically focussed on the much easier task of opposing British support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations in Gaza, the West Bank, and now in southern Lebanon.

This response to comrade Roberts is thus addressed to issues of general principle raised by the discussion, rather than to a range of secondary issues which are (I agree with comrade Roberts here) potentially merely side-tracks.² They are three: the militia question; ‘revolutionary defeatism’, its meaning, and slogans; and the purpose of the PCC statement and its relationship to the problems of ‘partyism’ and left unity.

Militia question

Comrade Roberts’ article, and the proposed alternative statement she and other comrades put forward, muddle the difference between the demand for a popular militia and the idea of workers’ defence guards/ workers’ militia. Thus in her article, she refers early on to whether communists “should openly argue for the establishment of workers’ defence units (popular militias) to replace the standing army”; later in the argument, to “popular militia”. In the alternative statement, the confusion extends further:

10. We support the democratic republican principle of the replacement of the standing army by democratic and accountable workers’ defence units (or a popular militia/citizen army), as part of our strategy of splitting the army and transforming the working class into the ruling class. Towards this goal, communists fight for freedom of political speech within the army, the right of soldiers to organise in trade unions and political parties and other democratic demands.

The demand for a popular militia, or universal military training and the universal arming of the people, as an alternative to the standing army, was a common element of the programmes of the left, beginning with the 1848 Demands of the Communist Party in Germany and down to 1914 (including the 1900 manifesto of the Labour Party).³ Friedrich Engels argued in 1893 in Can Europe disarm? for universal military training in schools as the means of implementing this idea.⁴

The point of this demand is to pose an alternative to the existing regime of mercenary army and mercenary/conservative (small c) party-loyalist police force. Universal military training and the universal arming of the people immediately reduces the practicality of the use of the armed forces against the working class internally, and in imperialist adventures abroad. Strategically, it is the beginning of the return of the public power to the people, that is, a state which begins to wither away.

The demand for political and trade union rights in the existing armed forces would be a step towards the popular militia, because it is a step away from the idea of the soldiers as mercenaries and as the robot servants of their officers (and behind them, the monarchy to which they swear loyalty).

The workers’ militia, in contrast, is, as Lenin put it in May 1917, a step towards a people’s militia.⁵ A step towards because workers’ militia or workers’ defence guards under capitalist rule are inevitably ad hoc volunteer groups, roughly organised, with limited training and limited arms. Even under US conditions, they could at most stand off police or ‘Pinkerton men’ long enough to force the state to bring in heavy weapons units (and more hopefully, to allow fraternisation and political appeals to persuade the soldiers to refuse to fire). The demand for workers’ defence guards is posed by police, ‘security firm’, far-right, etc, attacks on workers’ organisations and actions. It is not immediately posed by the UK participating in conducting a US proxy war on Russia which threatens to slide into great-power war.

This confusion between popular militia and workers’ militia bears on why introducing the militia demand into the statement would be diversionary today.

The people’s militia demand disappeared from the political arsenal of the left from around 1918. Paradoxically as it may seem, this disappearance was the result of the failure of workers’ militia. The effect of the land decree of the new Council of People’s Commissars in October 1917 was to set in motion the dissolution of the Russian army, as conscript soldiers deserted to return to their villages to seize land. What remained was the Red Guards. But in February 1918, when peace negotiations broke down, the Red Guards proved wholly unable to resist the victorious German eastern front field army. The Russians were forced to accept German terms at Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky, replaced as commissar for foreign affairs, was appointed commissar for war, and began the building of the Soviet Red Army as a regular army, much of whose officer corps was drawn from the old tsarist army (with supervision by political commissars and by the Cheka).

This turn in the Russian revolution was reflected in the replacement of the popular militia demand by ambiguous formulations on the military question in the 1919 programme of the Russian Communist Party, and in an ‘algebraic formulation’ (“arming the proletariat, disarming the bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations”) in the platform proposed for ‘workers’ governments’ by the Fourth Congress of Comintern in 1922.⁶

The abandonment of the popular militia slogan was a mistake. In the first place, the defeat of an improvised workers’ militia by a regular army that had already decisively defeated the Russian regular army is not evidence against a permanent organised and trained popular militia as a defence and policing policy. Just for example, autumn 1914 showed that the British regular forces were insufficient and the existing ‘Territorial Force’ were extensively deployed.

Secondly, abandoning the popular militia slogan struck at the heart of the minimum programme as a democratic programme. Substituting the idea of workers’ defence guards was to fall into the illusions of revolutionary syndicalism; the ‘algebraic formulation’, on the other hand, was substantially politically empty. Hence CPGB includes in our Draft programme, has campaigned and continues to campaign, when it is appropriate, for the popular militia slogan, universal military training and universal arming of the people: the Swiss model extended.

Nonetheless, the abandonment of the popular militia slogan was a decision of the Russian Communist Party and of Comintern in the time of Lenin and Trotsky. And the result is that those Trotskyist groups that have not collapsed, way of ‘transitional method’, into economism and pacifism, cling to Comintern formulations and to the syndicalist version of the workers’ militia as an alternative.

The purpose of the PCC statement was (we will return to this) to draw political lines on the left round the fundamentals of communist policy in a war, reactionary on both sides, to which our own state is a party (if largely an indirect party, apart from whatever British military techs, trainers, etc, may be operating in Ukraine). In this context we have common ground with those Trotskyists prepared to take broadly dual-defeatist positions, irrespective of their positions on the popular militia question. Introducing the popular militia slogan into a statement would therefore be diversionary.

It makes matters worse that comrade Roberts’ article, and the proposed alternative statement, blur the lines between CPGB’s popular militia slogan and the Trotskyists’ mistaken view that only the slogan of a workers’ militia is principled.

At this point I think it is worthwhile to make a small autocritique of the PCC statement, which also includes a few elements which I think, on second thoughts, are diversionary. They are not the issues comrade Roberts originally proposed to delete - paragraphs. 1-10 on the immediate danger of escalation into World War III, and paragraph 19 on the political responsibility of the ‘arm, arm, arm Ukraine’ enthusiasts for tax rises and social expenditure cuts. These points were fundamental.

However, first: it was important to make the point that the game in which Biden sought to make Britain, France, etc, take responsibility for first use of Storm Shadow and so on medium-range missiles against 1991-2014 Russian territory was about escalation towards full Nato involvement, not about these weapons really being war-winners. However, it was unnecessary to exclude the possibility that they could have decisive military effect. The second and third sentences of point 4 says: “Yes, they will make a marginal difference, but they will not - cannot - turn the tide of the war. Russia has already moved most important command posts, airforce bases and major storage facilities inside Russia, beyond their 155-mile range.” This military speculation is unnecessary to the point and hence diversionary.

Second: it was equally important to make the point that the “defence” of nuclear installations was being proposed as a ground of Nato full entry into the war (points 5-6). This was, again, important evidence of the escalation drive and of nuclear brinkmanship. But the final sentence of point 6 is “Clearly nuclear power is inherently dangerous.” In my opinion true, but again diversionary - like the introduction of the militia question, it raises an issue debated on the left and reduces the sharp focus on the war issue.

Tramlines

It is easy for polemics to become “tramlined” (as cars used to get stuck in tram tracks on roads, and can still get stuck in road surface irregularities) and go off in a non-useful direction. In the present case this has, I think, happened. The way it has happened is that comrade Roberts’ original letter included the statement that:

The concept of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ and the slogan, ‘The main enemy is at home’, are crucially important in this context. The PCC says these ideas are implicit in the text and the request to make them explicit is a sign of “fetishism with words”. … I really cannot see why we should abandon ‘The main enemy is at home’. It is succinct, understandable, recognisable, it speaks to our political history and our political practice, and it sums up what we fight for - in stark contrast to much of the left.

Comrade Conrad’s reply made the point that the PCC statement concluded with the formulation,

Clear lines of demarcation must be drawn. This is the necessary condition for developing the political consciousness of the advanced section of the working class and then taking the struggle of the broad masses from the narrow routine of trade unionism and economics to the level of high politics and thereby the perspective of turning what is a war between reactionary capitalist powers into a civil war - a revolution - for democracy, socialism and communism.

That is, a version of the Bolshevik slogan of 1914-1916, to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”, which Lenin characterised as “the only correct proletarian slogan”.⁷ (“The main enemy is at home” was Karl Liebknecht’s.⁸)

However, comrade Conrad went on to make at considerable length the point made by Hal Draper and by Lars T Lih, that after the February 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks dropped talk of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ and the slogan ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’. The point comrade Conrad was making was not that we were in conditions like those after February 1917 in Russia, but simply that particular forms of words must not be fetishised.

Comrade Roberts, in her article, takes this to be an argument that the situation in Britain is analogous to that in Russia after February 1917. She goes on to use a passage from my book Revolutionary strategy to argue that the Bolsheviks, in spite of dropping the slogan, continued to carry on an anti-war agitation. (Lenin’s May 1917 article on the local elections, cited above, is an example: the Bolsheviks sought electoral blocs “only with the internationalists … in keeping with the decisions of our conferences (the Petrograd and the All-Russia conferences) and with the basic policy of the proletarian party aimed against petty-bourgeois defencism …”).

True, but utterly irrelevant, for the reason given above: the PCC statement actually uses the slogan of the Bolsheviks in 1914-17: to turn the reactionary war into a civil war.

Comrade Roberts’ article, and the alternative statement, both argue for forms of ‘direct action’ against the war. In comrade Roberts’ article: “A mass Communist Party would surely organise and run demonstrations, strikes, boycotts of weapons shipments and other actions to disrupt the war effort. Without any illusion that these tactics by themselves will succeed - they must always be linked with a strategy for taking power.”

Alternative

And in the alternative statement, “While we welcome strikes, boycotts and other actions against the war, we always need to explain that by themselves they cannot succeed. Such actions need to be linked with a strategy of overthrowing the international capitalist state system and for the working class to become the hegemon of society.”

Comrade Roberts’ article makes significant use of my discussion of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in Revolutionary strategy. But she has clearly missed my use there of Lenin’s argument against the approach she argues for (Revolutionary strategy, p71):

In November 1914 Lenin wrote: “Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc, are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations.”⁹

In July 1915, in arguing, against Trotsky, for “practical actions leading toward such defeat”, Lenin comments as an aside: “For the ‘penetrating reader’: This does not at all mean to ‘blow up bridges’, organise unsuccessful military strikes, and, in general, to help the government to defeat the revolutionaries.”¹⁰

The issue is, in fact, the same as the issue of conflating the slogan of the popular militia with the slogan of the workers’ militia. In promoting ‘direct action’ against the war, comrade Roberts and the supporters of the alternative resolution are adapting to the left-syndicalism of the Trotskyists.

Why are such proposals “in general, to help the government to defeat the revolutionaries”? The answer is the usual problem with left-syndicalism - the need to fight for a political majority. Direct-actionist initiatives result in the vanguard (meaning in this context advanced mass sections of the class, not party cadres) isolating itself from the masses and exposing itself to repression. The result would be disasters like January 1919 in Berlin or March 1921 in Saxony.

Purpose

Comrade Roberts thought that the purpose of the statement was the immediate construction of unity. In fact, it was an attempt to draw political lines, and to get a political response from other groups and the sects of one member called ‘independents’. In that respect it has largely failed.

Lying behind this purpose and this failure is that unity is practically only possible if the far left breaks with its current common method of operation. That is, each individual organisation seeks to ‘Go to the masses’ by dropping awkward issues for the sake of diplomatic unity with forces to their right round economic, or more generally fashionable, issues. This can be called “united front policy” (following Georgi Dimitrov’s ‘united front’ concept from the 1935 Seventh Congress of Comintern, in which disagreements are suppressed for the sake of unity). Or it can be called “transitional method”.

The small minority that doesn’t follow this method clings to mere dogmatic ‘orthodox’ rigid lists of slogans, which must all be included on every leaflet: thus small western Maoist groups, and thus the Spartacists and sub-Spartacist groups (International Bolshevik Tendency, and so on), who were infected with it through the Spartacists’ dive into the radical left of the youth circa 1970, leading to infection with the party conceptions of the US Maoist ‘New Communist Movement’. Associated with both approaches is the radical separation of what can be discussed internally and what can be published.

The commitment to unity being necessarily on the basis of privately constructed diplomatic agreements and the radical separation of internal debate and external publication, have the result that far left groups cannot unite among themselves, or even explain publicly what separates Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century from Counterfire, or from Anticapitalist Resistance, or from Socialist Alternative, or ... and so on to the 57th variety. The result is that as far as the broad workers’ vanguard (the long-time activists of the trade union and labour movement and so on) is concerned, the far left necessarily appears as the Judean People’s Front versus the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s life of Brian.

This method extends, on the right, to include Collective; on the left, to include Prometheus. It would be perfectly possible in principle to have a united Trotskyist party, rejecting CPGB’s commitment to maximum/minimum programme (for example) if comrades would break with the method of separation of internal and external debate and of diplomatic agreements as the only road to unity. In reality, however, at the moment it is only CPGB that is willing to break with the method.

This is why we try to get responses from the rest of the left, and why we don’t succeed. It is the real ground of the unwillingness of comrades to engage politically with the CPGB’s arguments. The point was transparent in RS21’s refusal to discuss with us at all, at the time of their split from SWP.

At this point we return to ‘not fit for purpose’. True in a sense. That is, that we on the PCC did not expect that CPGB comrades would respond to antagonistic comment on social media by accepting their interlocutors’ excuses for not engaging politically with the PCC statement - that is, by open agreement or disagreement.

“Too long” was, in reality, code for: “not a diplomatic agreement”. Other aspects of the objections are (as I hope I have shown above) really that the statement was not left-syndicalist. It would be more productive to hear these directly from non-CPGB comrades than refracted through CPGB comrades’ adaptation to hostile objections on social media. But that would be no doubt be making an unacceptable concession to CPGB’s insistence on public debate.

1. ‘Establishing a principled left’ Weekly Worker October 3 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1509/establishing-a-principled-left); ‘Danger of World War III: the communist response’ October 24 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1512/danger-of-world-war-iii-the-communist-response). See also comrade Roberts’ letter of October 10 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1510/letters); Jack Conrad’s response, ‘Wrong and right war politics’, October 17 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1511/wrong-and-right-war-politics), comrade Roberts’ article, ‘Different times, different slogans’, October 24 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1512/carla), to which this article responds; and ‘Debating our culture’ October 31 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1513/debating-our-culture).↩︎

2. For a single example: comrade Roberts says that “The war in Ukraine is not yet quite as unpopular as the British government’s support for Israel’s campaign of genocide against the Palestinians.” But in reality, Ukraine-defencism is dominant in the labour movement and involves a significant section of the far left; and polls show continuing strong supports for arms to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia: eg, www.statista.com/statistics/1371642/gb-public-opinion-on-measures-to-support-ukraine.↩︎

3. References are collected in Jack Conrad’s article, ‘Popular militia versus standing army’ Weekly Worker January 7 2016 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1088/popular-militia-vs-standing-army).↩︎

4. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 27, London 1990, pp367‑93.↩︎

5. ‘The proletarian party at the district council elections’ (May 26 1917): www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/13.htm.↩︎

6. www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/1919/03/22.htm; www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics-of-comintern.htm, section 11, ‘The workers’ government’.↩︎

7. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/sep/00.htm; www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/ch01.htm (September 1915); www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/junius-pamphlet.htm (July 1916).↩︎

8. www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1915/05/main-enemy-home.htm. See also JP Joubert, ‘Revolutionary defeatism’ (1988): www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol1/no3/revdeft.html.↩︎

9. VI Lenin ‘The position and tasks of the Socialist International’ CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, p35.↩︎

10. VI Lenin ‘The defeat of one’s own government in the imperialist war’ CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, p275.↩︎