07.11.1996

Practice through theory

Phil Sharpe of the Trotskyist Unity Group opened a discussion on communist unity at the Communist University ’96 with this contribution

We live in a world where, within the developments in contemporary capitalism, anti-intellectualism is the norm. Nihilism and philistinism is what characterises bourgeois ideology. However clever and perceptive these commentators are, they cannot fully get to grips with the nature and crisis of capitalism. That is what we expect from the bourgeoisie in understanding class consciousness, as Lukacs pointed out. But the real tragedy is that these ideological pressures force themselves upon Marxism.

One of the greatest Marxists this century, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, himself makes an accommodation to bourgeois ideology in his statement about Marxism being omnipotent because it is true. This is a false conception of himself as a world historical leader. This inability to reflect on Marxist philosophy, the inability to intellectually develop, has been part of the crisis of Marxism at each conjuncture in the class struggle that poses these serious theoretical and political questions.

First of all, in order to come to unity, I want to deal with the question of splits. Splits in Marxism have served as clarification. In the First International Marx did not want to split with the anarchists; he was prepared to work with them. But what actually characterises anarchism is its profession to be anti-elitist and against the supposed authoritarianism of Marxism. It is actually a form of utopian socialism.

Bakunin, whether he read Nietzsche or not, saw himself as a superman riding through history with many schemes to transform Russian society. It was a form of national messianic socialism - that individual will is sufficient to change objective conditions. That is why Marx, in developing scientific socialism, had an irreconcilable struggle on with Bakunin which eventually led to the parting of the ways of the First International.

The tragedy is that, despite being a different ideological trend, the ideological utopianism within anarchism - subjective voluntarism and messianic individualism - has been continually reproduced in the history of Marxism itself.

Then in the Second International, for Kautsky - for obvious reasons given the mass size of German social democracy - Germany became the centre of world revolution. The rest of the world proletariat had to sacrifice itself to political developments in Germany. Ultimately the biggest irony is that the German proletariat was supposed to sacrifice itself in the slaughter of the first imperialist war. Only after that would the perfect conditions for socialism be created.

The ideology of socialism in one country is always about instrumentally sacrificing the international working class of the present for a supposed inevitable end of communism in the future. In order to get the working class to accept those sacrifices it says, ‘Don’t worry that millions of you will be slaughtered in World War I, because after that we will have communism.’

That ideological approach was translated in developments in Bolshevism itself, which was an initial reaction against that historical idealism, against that instrumental view of history. Indeed Lenin in his many replies to Kautsky says, ‘You go on about numerous people that have been killed at the time of the October revolution and the civil war, and yet you were silent during the inter-imperialist war, when millions of workers were slaughtered.’ The very problems of the Russian civil war were created by the fact that German and international social democracy reneged on the struggle for international socialism, which isolated the revolution.

These views that Trotsky, Lenin and Bukharin attempted to rebuke were again reproduced within the development of Stalinism. We have the increasing domination of the theory of socialism in one country, based not just upon Bukharin and the NEP arguing for the proletarian-peasant alliance; it was actually based on the understandable view - given the success of the October revolution - that Russia was the centre and bastion of world revolution. The international proletariat had to support that fortress.

Therefore you get that instrumentality creeping in once again. If necessary, the international working class has to hold back so that we can build the Soviet Union as the bastion of world revolution. In the future, comrades, you again can come to the fore. Sacrifice yourself for the moment, support the popular front in France and Spain, sacrifice your independent class interest. Only after the Soviet Union has built socialism can the class struggle advance with the development of the Soviet Union as a state system. Again we have the Kautskyite conception of instrumentality and self-sacrifice, which once more is increasingly based on the interests of the bureaucratic elite.

There is one misconception within Trotskyism about this: Stalinism has not been against revolution; it has not been against a form of bureaucratic revolution. In the post-war period Stalinism was prepared to overthrow capitalism, which created a lot of confusion within the Fourth International and led to a lot of opportunist adaptations to Stalinism. This was not a negation of the theory of socialism in one country, but actually its confirmation. The strengthening of the conception of bureaucratic revolution cemented the cold war system in building up a barrier between the working class of the West and the East, to constrain the working class within two competing economic and political systems at the expense of actual proletarian revolution.

Stalin actually predicted this at the 1934 Party congress. He said we want imperialism to leave us alone; we want to have peace and tranquillity to build socialism in one country. If imperialism threatens us we will export revolution. He had a caricatured conception of what the left communists had previously advocated.

Despite all the political difficulties within Bolshevism we have these desperate attempts to develop scientific socialism, even taking into account the ideological problems I have mentioned. On the other hand we have the domination of utopian socialism. Using the phraseology of Adorno in Negative Dialectics, we actually have the realisation of philosophical idealism, the realisation of the view that the conceptions of the world historical individual, whether it be Stalin or Kautsky, are actually fulfilled in reality; the view that idealist, subjective, absolute spirit is fulfilled in reality, and all the rest of us just have to accept its instrumental logic.

Historical idealism and the inability to philosophically reflect upon it was not sufficiently challenged by those trying to uphold scientific socialism, even though we stand in that tradition and are trying to develop it ourselves.

These were necessary splits between revolutionary Marxism and historical utopian socialism. But there was also an unnecessary split within Bolshevism, between Bogdanov and Lenin.

Bogdanov massively contributed to the building of the Bolshevik Party. Far more workers read the works of Bogdanov than they ever did of Lenin. He often put his ideas across in imaginative ways, in science fiction and novels, etc. In the debate within Marxist philosophy, even though Plekhanov had a subjective idealist standpoint, Lenin’s critique was concerned with Plekhanov’s philosophical conservatism; which ultimately was concerned about parroting and repeating the phraseology of Marx and Engels on the question of philosophy.

Precisely because Bogdanov was a Bolshevik and wanted to challenge the politics of the Mensheviks, he raised these philosophical questions. I am not saying that Lenin’s philosophical materialism is not a good reply to Bogdanov’s approach, but the problem is that the notion that philosophy is a Party political question became a precedent. Lenin was saying that you are only a Bolshevik if you are philosophical materialist, rather than adhere to the standpoint that Bogdanov was raising.

The biggest irony was that when Lenin was attempting to get at the roots of the degeneration of the Second International, and when he looked at the mechanical materialism and fatalism of Kautsky and Plekhanov in a new and enriched form, he was actually carrying on Bogdanov’s critique of mechanical materialism. In that sharp and contradictory opinion was the collective development of theory within the Bolshevik Party: firstly in the philosophical revolution by Lenin in the Philosophical Notebooks; and secondly in how that facilitated Lenin and Bukharin and others to develop their conception of imperialism and historical materialism. They were clearing out the baggage of the positivism and fatalism of Kautsky and Plekhanov and others.

The Fourth International was faced with very challenging political developments in the expansion of Stalinism. It is interesting that the majority of the Fourth International came towards a positivist view: they thought what we need to do is develop scientific theories of Trotsky by elaborating on the conception of the degenerated revolution, etc. Valuable work was done in the late 1940s by Mandel and others. What was not done was to actually reflect upon the categories that Trotsky had developed for understanding the Soviet Union: ie, the question of nationalisation and planning on which to base one’s understanding of the workers’ state - given that the extension of nationalisation and planning in the expansion of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe was based upon counterrevolutionary developments against the international working class.

It is no coincidence that one person who developed a challenge to the opportunist tendencies of people like Pablo (who fetishised nationalisation and planning and therefore adapted to Stalinism) was CLR James who developed Marxist philosophy in that period. When CLR James met Trotsky in the late 1930s, Trotsky commented that what James had written on world revolution was all very well; but where is the dialectics?

That was an anti-intellectual comment, because Trotsky was saying that the theory of Stalinism is the property of various individuals. He used the ideological development of formulations to try and suppress the new ideas that CLR James was bringing to the understanding of Stalinism. But James rose to the challenge which Trotsky made on dialectics. His work is the most elaborate philosophical critique of Trotskyism and its philosophy, strategy and perspectives that has ever been raised and has not yet been answered. He thought Trotsky had a level of what Hegel called synthetic cognition; that his categories were fixed in the early 1920s and were abstract universals imposed on the reality of a changing and moving phenomenon such as Stalinism. The counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism was still there but we have to continually develop our categories to understand that. That is not just a question of historical materialism and programme. To bring that out, a philosophical revolution is needed.

The tragedy is that a lot of the aspects that James was bringing out, which was itself to justify the view of a dialectically changing reality, was that he himself capitulated to a form of historical idealism. He said that state capitalism, as personified by the Soviet bureaucracy, is a higher stage of capitalist development, a process of the negation of the negation, which will end up in communism because of the spontaneous imperatives of the proletariat. In recognising a real problem, you do not do away with the problem of idealism. There is still theoretical work to be done, even when we recognise the kernel of truth of what a particular individual or group is trying to come to terms with.

The biggest ironic tragedy in the history of the Fourth International was that by not sufficiently critiquing the idealist view of the Soviet bureaucracy, with the Soviet Union as the centre of world revolution, they reproduced it organisationally and politically in their own practice. As an alternative to Stalinism, Cannon postulated the view that the American working class is the centre of world revolution; that that would be the basis of breaking the log jam. By fetishising the American working class in that way you are developing the recipe for a national form of centrism and Trotskyism.

Nevertheless Cannon’s letter against Pablo’s opportunism does have merits in trying to develop Trotskyism.

In the 1960s the main opportunist force in Trotskyism, the United Secretariat codified this conception of a geographical view of world revolution by projecting the Cuban revolution onto the world revolution and seeing Cuba in some objectivist and almost magical way as overcoming the problems of world Stalinism. That was based on the conception of the ‘third world’ as the centre of world revolution.

Look at the recent developments within the League for a Revolutionary Communist International. Within the LRCI Trotskyist manifesto, because of their unwillingness to reflect on these theoretical problems within the history of the Fourth International, they have reproduced it themselves in this changing situation.

Their conception of world revolution was based upon the view that political revolution was the strategic aspect - again the USSR as the centre of world revolution. When that did not materialise and instead there were counterrevolutionary developments, rather than reflect both historically and immediately on that problem, they retreated to a form of pragmatic evasion that tried to maintain those perspectives. In order not to reflect, we have a form of instrumental elitism that suppressed the possibility of debating within the LRCI.

Again we see a form of historical idealism that glosses over the complexity of the political problems involved in overthrowing these reactionary forces, and instead adapts to them.

In order to maintain the LRCI’s perspective of political revolution, they adapted on the one hand to Yeltsin, calling for a united front in 1991, and on the other hand to very reactionary Stalinist forces. This is not to bash the LRCI, but to use it as a specific example of the theoretical and political problems that you get into in regards to the unwillingness to face up to the problems of the complexity of social reality.

How do we overcome this problem and develop a conception of communist unity through addressing it?

I just want to quote from E Pliman’s Lenin’s political testament on disputes within the Bolshevik Party just after the October revolution:

“But the qualitative difference between Marxist theory and pre-Marxian theory does not at all negate the dialectical nature of the development of thought. The possibility of a whole number of collisions, clashes, theory and practice, a whole number of internal contradictions in the leading centre of the revolution, contradictions that are not at all simple to resolve. The socialist revolution was movement along an extremely complex and winding, unexplored road, on which there were unexpected obstacles and turns which require just as rapid and sharp turns in policy. The road and concrete forms of this movement could not have been known in advance to any one of the leaders. It was extremely difficult to determine the right course in these constantly changing conditions. At these specially sharp turns of the proletarian revolution, some of the leaders who did not have Lenin’s sense of realism, his ability to quickly change gear and reject a slogan that clashed with practice, were unable to rapidly overcome their inertia, revise tactics and give up former party policies which were relevant to their time but disastrous for the revolution in the new situation, when the forms and conditions of the class struggle had changed dramatically.”

What is good about this quote is that it is saying that reality is dialectical, because that is the ontological principle and premises that help us to understand reality, but there will always be heterogeneous opinions. You cannot automatically have a correspondence between theory and reality, theory and truth. But there is an objective basis in reality for a sharp clash of opinion. That is the kernel of truth in what he is saying.

The problem is that even if we agree that Lenin was more astute and farsighted than the rest of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party on a whole number of questions between 1917 and 1923, there is still a tendency to conceive Lenin as the infallible world historical leader with all the answers. This is the problem, because when Lenin died what was the Bolshevik Party to do? Bukharin did not have a clue. He pragmatically tried to come to terms with what had happened with Lenin - no one was more inconsolable than Bukharin in the absence of Lenin - and therefore a rigid Lenin of the NEP of 1921-23 was codified. That was ‘Leninism’; Bukharin became the voice of ‘Leninism’.

He actually lost the independent voice that he had had in the Bolshevik Party before the death of Lenin. He actually repudiates whole sections of his work as a Marxist-Leninist on imperialism and the state, because that conflicted with the pragmatic needs of practice in the period after 1921; which he then justified in this ideological projection of the mythical Lenin and Leninism onto his own opportunist practice. He was therefore moving away from Leninism which requires conflict and contradiction of opinion in trying to come to terms with the contradictory relationship to reality.

We might be criticised ourselves for posing as having the absolute truth and assuming a correspondence between theory and reality. We recognise that this is a problem that we have not adequately dealt with. We have already got our own ideological legacy and baggage. In the period between 1992 and 1995 we were possibly overdetermined by Althusserian Marxism; we did not adequately reflect upon our own philosophical premises.

I am attempting to challenge this assumption of an automatic correspondence between reality and truth, from which it is assumed within Marxism that there is no disjuncture or contradiction between the cognising subject and the object of inquiry. There is an idealist identity reasoning that assumes, because the party is the subject of history, it therefore has an automatic correspondence between reality and itself. In doing that, you dissolve the object into the subject. You deny the objective difficulties in overthrowing world capitalism. That is not pessimism, but trying to come to terms with the objective and structural difficulties of overthrowing world capitalism and developing a perspective of world socialist revolution.

We can look at these philosophical difficulties in the relationship between the LRCI and the Workers International League and their international grouping, the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency. They have similar views on the history of the Fourth International and on permanent revolution and strategic perspectives. Their talks on revolutionary regroupment broke down because they could not in their theory and practice accept that their programme might have difficulties in corresponding to reality. One grouping says, ‘our programme is correct’ and for the others it is their programme that is incorrect - hence the clash. This is unable to bring about the unity of opposites and could only bring conflict in what Hegel called the negative dialectic and an ever regressive spiral downwards. The theoretical inflexibility and programmatic dogmatism ultimately justifies the exclusion of the minority within the LRCI when sharp differences arise on programme and politics.

It is not just a problem with Keith Harvey or any other leaders of Workers Power. There are deep seated philosophical problems that individuals have only sporadically tried to come to terms with. This is the tragedy of Lenin, because he was starting to come to terms with those questions in the Philosophical Notebooks - but they were only fragments: they are insights that need to be developed: not for academic indulgence, not as passive spectators, but precisely because we are serious about the question of world proletarian revolution. Unless we tackle those philosophical questions, they will not go away; they just become more regressive, more vicious, more problematic and counterproductive in developing the theoretical and political unity necessary for socialist revolution.

The alternative of people like Cyril Smith and New Interventions has to be challenged. They say, ‘Look at all these problems within Marxism: it is not to do with Marx. Let’s put it onto Leninism and Stalinism.’ By resurrecting the pure, infallible Marx, these philosophical problems do not go away - after all, what was the Thesis on Feuerbach about? It attempted to develop a philosophical alternative to Feuerbach’s mechanical materialism and Hegel’s idealism. One of the central tenets of that thesis was that practice is the primary aspect in defining reality.

That progressive philosophic development unfortunately has been used by Stalinism and social democracy in the most idealist way to suppress revolutionary Marxism. They say, ‘How can you criticise the Soviet Union? In practice we are building socialism - you are therefore not serious about the revolution: you are a counterrevolutionary.’ We see the thesis reduced to a caricature as a transformation into its opposite. This philosophical development becomes the justification of the instrumental logic of Stalinism and its incessant praxis and idealism, which is used both to suppress the Soviet working class and the world working class.

I am not trying to dispose of the interventions of people like Cyril Smith who has written a book on his experiences within the Workers Revolutionary Party. The problem is in trying to tackle these problems within Marxist revolutionary organisations, people always attempt to throw out the baby with the bathwater. They say that Marxism has emphasised scientific socialism, the Party and explanatory theory, which should be thrown out - Marxism is not about explanatory theory; it is about a conception of the communist society. But how can you have a conception of the arrival of communism without the development of explanatory theory?

People might have used explanatory theory in an instrumental way in the past, but let us not react in a subjective way against theory and explanation. In our organisations attempts at explanation have been halted as a diversion from practice. In that pragmatic evasion about the political questions that have been raised, the justification for instrumentality is used. They may have the best of intentions, but the best of intentions do not define the world. It is the structures of capitalism and our structural location within it that is primarily important for understanding those intentions. Every time someone raises a problem with theoretical questions, there is also a tendency towards ideological suppression of the objective content - about the theory and practice of the organisations.

Where does that leave the Trotskyist Unity Group in terms of communist unity? We have had a constructive relationship with Open Polemic: they rejected the attempts of Stalinists to exclude us, so have contributed to rapprochement in a very concrete way. We have attempted to develop a critique of various theoretical conceptions of Open Polemic. By doing this, we have attempted to bring out these philosophical and historical materialist questions; we have tried to develop in a conscious way the process towards communist unity.

The demise of Stalinism has created a new political situation for the development of communist regroupment and unity. We do not believe in original sin. We do not believe that, because somebody once had a position which we might still characterise as counterrevolutionary, under these new conditions of dialogue that still precludes talking with those comrades. We have acted against this equation of organisational hardness and political principle. Instead we are for the utmost organisational flexibility, but not at the expense of continuing to develop these theoretical questions and analyses. That is part of the heritage of the understanding we developed in our own past political experiences, and part of what we want to contribute to the future.

There are no easy answers. We have to come to terms with 150 years of idealism. But at least, by recognising this problem, we are in part theoretically able to tackle it and develop an answer and go on from there. We know that there will still be contradictions and clashes of opinion. We want to be part of that regroupment and hope that the way forward can be related both to the building of a reforged Fourth International and the development of a world socialist Party.