03.10.1996

Federal republic or socialist republic?

John Stone of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International takes up the debate begun at Communist University ’96

In the United Kingdom there are few democratic tasks which were not fulfilled by the bourgeoisie. The abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords is on the agenda. The question is which class will fulfil these tasks.

Lenin, Trotsky and the revolutionary CPGB in its early days was in favour of a socialist republic based on workers’ councils. The only way to win the battle for democracy is to fight for a socialist revolution. In bourgeois elections the capitalists and their bureaucrats control the media, the police and finance the campaigns. We need to put them under the control of the working majority. This would mean expropriating the private banks, the media and the main companies and putting the few nationalised institutions under workers’ control.

A real democracy means ending unemployment, social inequalities and every racist law against immigrants. It is not possible to do that without a revolution, which must socialise the means of production. On a planet in which the richest 400 families control around a half of the wealth of the entire five billion human population, real democracy cannot be achieved separate from socialism.

The comrades from the Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the SWP) have a different schema. For them no country in the world is ready for a social revolution. Even the USA and the most advanced imperialist countries have to first go through a purely bourgeois democratic political revolution. In Britain they advocate a strategy for a purely bourgeois democratic federal republic. For that reason they want a minimum programme which does not raise any anti-capitalist demands.

They have the following schema. In Britain we need to replace the monarchy with a bourgeois republic. For that aim we need to mobilise the masses to achieve a dual power republic. It would be a capitalist republic in co-existence with workers’ councils in dual power. Later the workers’ councils would have to take power and establish a new republic. Nevertheless, even a revolution like that would not be a socialist revolution until the most important countries in the world have entered into such a process.

There are many problems with that position. The first Russian soviets established dual power directly with the monarchy in 1905. There existed the possibility that the Russian monarchy could have been replaced straightaway through a workers’ council semi-state. The proto-soviet bodies which existed in Britain or Italy in the 1920s could have created a dual power situation between the working organisations and the monarchy, like in Iran in 1979. If the miners’ strikes in the early 1970s and 1980s had been able to create a situation of dual power in Britain, the polarisation would have been between the workers’ organisations and the capitalist monarchy.

For the RDG it is inconceivable that the royal family could be overthrown through a workers revolution. For the RDG it is impossible and undesirable to avoid a bourgeois republic. They create a straitjacket for the proletariat.

The RDG thinking is mechanical. It creates a separate stage where it should not exist. The workers in Britain are historically fighting for the abolition of unemployment, social inequalities and private property.

Why do they have to cease fighting now for such demands, to moderate their programme for a purely bourgeois republican one and to support a new kind of capitalist state?

The most democratic federal republics in the planet, like the USA, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, etc, are violent dictatorships of capital against the toilers. Racism, unemployment, police harassment and repression against immigrants and trade unionists, participation in or support for imperialist massacres throughout the planet, etc - all of these things exist there.

The RDG will fight for anti-bourgeois and transitional demands only when the monarchy has been overthrown. Right from their foundation in the early 1980s, through the present day, right up to the republican revolution, the RDG will only raise a minimum, purely bourgeois democratic, programme. Nevertheless, even in the most advanced imperialist federal republics the RDG advocates a democratic revolution and purely bourgeois democratic programmes.

The Mensheviks advocated a purely democratic programme in backward Russia but in the advanced industrial countries they advocated a socialist revolution. Over the last 90 years the world has become more industrialised, and pre-capitalist relations have drastically diminished and are completely subordinated to capitalist relations. Nevertheless, the RDG is advocating a formula that even Plekhanov and Martov did not raise for Britain. In summary, the RDG advocates a more-than-two stage theory. First, a republican revolution. Second, a workers’ democratic one. Third, a socialist internationalist one. Because they are living in the first stage they advocate a purely bourgeois democratic programme.

This kind of strategy is directly reflected in a particular conception of Party. The RDG is in favour of a Communist-Labour party as a cohabitation party between revolutionaries and reformists. The workers’ lieutenants of capitalism (that is reformism) should coexist in the same party as the different variants of communists with the aim of fighting for the replacement of the monarchy with a republic. The Mensheviks and the advocates of a stageist conception of revolution had a similar conception of building a united workers’ party. Instead of a stageist party for a stageist programme and revolution, Leninists have to be in favour of a revolutionary Communist Party and international which should fight for a transitional programme and a workers’ councils semi-state.

The RDG thinks that the Labour Party is a capitalist party, while the CPGB thinks that it is a bourgeois workers’ party. The RDG has a sectarian attitude towards Labour, while at the same time it advocates a united party with Labourites and a purely republican capitalist minimum programme.

The RDG accuses us of ignoring democratic demands. No, we do not ignore them. We are for the national self-determination of the Irish nation as a whole, for the release of all political prisoners, for proportional representation, for the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, for the right of Scotland and Wales to have their own national assembly and, if they want, own independence, etc. The difference is that the RDG only wants to fight for those demands, whereas we want to fight for them in combination with socialist and anti-capitalist demands.

Lenin wanted a social revolution (ie, a revolution that would not only change the regime but also would overthrow the ruling class and replace it by the working class) while the RDG - which openly does not consider itself Leninist- only wants a political revolution (ie, a revolution which does not aim to destroy the capitalist system, but only changes the nature of its regime). The RDG’s first-stage republican revolution only wants to sack the monarchy, whereas we want to sack the entire capitalist class. We accuse our friends in the RDG of themselves ignoring the socialist, transitional and anti-capitalist demands. If you do that, you renounce the fight for consistent democracy, because you are not attacking the source of anti-democratic fetters: capitalism itself and bourgeois control of the media, arms and the economy.

The CPGB attitude is very contradictory. The Draft Programme produced by Jack Conrad states the CPGB aim is to make a social revolution to destroy the British capitalist state and to replace it with a workers’ soviet semi-state.

But the CPGB is also in favour of a British federal republic. When we ask what the difference would be between demands for a socialist federal republic and a classless federal republic, the RDG is very clear in its answer. For the RDG the federal republic is a separate stage in the revolution and it is clearly a bourgeois state. The CPGB is confused. To say on the one hand that the differences between the CPGB and the RDG are only semantic, and on the other hand that the federal republic which the CPGB fights for is a socialist and workers’ one is a contradiction in itself.

The CPGB is trying to assume a more open-minded attitude towards the national question in Scotland and Wales. That is progress. I think that the group from which we split (Workers Power) also had a sectarian attitude, which could lead to Great English nationalism. It is wrong to go from one extreme to the other. It is incorrect to defend a centralist state for Great Britain and oppose any Scottish assembly (like WP). I think that we should defend the right of the Scottish nation to have their own assembly and we need to advocate the necessity for workers’ republics in Wales, Scotland and England which have to be united in a socialist federation of Britain and Europe. Nevertheless, to advocate the replacement of the British monarchy with a classless (ie, bourgeois) federal republic is extremely confused. It could be understood as strategy for transforming the British state into a federal republic like Italy, Germany, etc.

The CPGB does not agree with the project for a united reformist-revolutionary ‘Communist-Labour party’, nor with the pure bourgeois democratic programme of the RDG. The CPGB thinks that its minimum programme is valid up to the achievement of a socialist revolution. The CPGB, despite its great rupture from Stalinism, has not completely broken from the Stalinist understanding of dividing the programme in two (minimum and maximum). The minimum programme which its advocates is a hybrid between a transitional programme and the kind of minimum bourgeois programme advocated by other ‘communist’ parties and the RDG.

I hope that the comrades from the RDG, who always show a democratic and open-minded spirit, will rethink their positions, and that the comrades from the CPGB will adopt a more consistent policy. We need to defend the Leninist conception of the social revolution and we should not retreat into pre-Leninists views of stageist revolutions, programmes and parties.