Letters

Subordinating the class

For the editor of a journal entitled What next? (surely not an accidental reference to Lenin’s essay Where to begin? and pamphlet What is to be done?), Bob Pitt holds a curious view of his political tasks, and presumably those of all communists and revolutionary socialists.

In his article ‘A single step forward’ (Weekly Worker July 3), after explaining his view of the attacks to come under Labour, he argues passionately for Marxists to follow his example in becoming reformist and even Labourites in practice.

Therefore we should give up the revolutionary demand for the abolition of all anti-trade union laws in order to “construct a majority bloc within the movement against the Labour leadership around the question of reforming the anti-union laws”.

Throughout the article no distinction is made between the tasks of revolutionaries and the campaigns spontaneously thrown up by the ideology of reformism in the workers movement. He reduces the role of the conscious element of the class to a mere technical one. We must apparently organise the spontaneous demands of the working class better. Unfortunately the defensiveness and atomisation of our class is not a technical matter, it is a political one.

It is precisely a narrowing of the political vision of the working class which is the problem. This narrow perspective leads workers to believe that if they are only reasonable enough and work hard enough in collaboration with the Labour Party the trade union leaders and the bosses, they can be persuaded that advocating a marginal increase in poverty wages will not harm their respective positions too greatly. Bob offers the slogans for this view.

This is the perspective of the majority Pitt argues, so putting forward any other perspective is simply hopeless. Fortunately for the working class and the future of society, majorities and minorities are not such fixed categories. Bob’s minority has no perspective of actually becoming a majority. All that Bob can do then is to join the majority by dumping his minority view, or at least keeping it very close to his chest (which usually amounts to the same thing). Lenin wrote in 1902 that the founding of Rabochaya Mysl in Russia had “brought economism to the light of day” (What is to be done? Peking 1978 p43). Why? Because, he argued: “Instead of sounding the call to go forward towards the consolidation of the revolutionary organisation and the expansion of political activity, the call was issued for a retreat to the purely trade-union struggle” (ibid p44). These were of course different times. Pitt argues this course in a period of working class retreat, the economists in Russia argued it at a time of upturn in spontaneous struggle in which socialist organisation lagged behind. But this was Lenin’s struggle - to forge an organisation that could act as a weapon in the class out of the various amateurish propagandist circles of socialists that existed.

There must be a difference between what the working class movement spontaneously “constructs” within the limits of reformist consciousness and how revolutionaries intervene in these campaigns to make demands for reforms into revolutionary demands. As Lenin continued to argue in What is to be done? “The spontaneous development of the working class movement leads precisely to its subordination to bourgeois ideology.” (ibid p50). Bob Pitt at present subordinates Marxism to a theoretical journal by championing reformist practice and thus the subordination of the working class to bourgeois ideology.

In Pitt’s own example of the minimum wage it is difficult to see what impact as revolutionaries, rather than reformist foot soldiers, we can have by limiting ourselves to spontaneously raised demands. In this case Bob would have us campaign for a below subsistence level minimum wage. The revolutionary struggle and Marxism must not reveal themselves (until when we don’t know), but remain safely in the head - or journals - of academics.

Bob’s espousal that “a single step forward for the class is, after all, worth a thousand programmes” is highly disingenuous therefore. The bastardised quote is actually Marx referring to the class beginning to form itself being worth a thousand programmes. That is, a class beginning to go onto the offensive, not atomised workers begging for more crumbs from the capitalist table.

Bob clearly wants to remove all idea of programme from the working class movement. Spectacularly he fails to see the difference between reforms won by a class moving onto the offensive which can be infused with revolutionary programme, and reforms (even the same reforms) given as concessions to isolated movements to stave off the possibility of a burgeoning revolutionary programmatic movement of the class.

As Bob points out at the beginning of his article, many reforms that have been partially won and partially given are now being clawed back as the class has been battered onto the defensive. The NHS, the welfare state, trade union rights, were all temporary gains which are now being snatched back. The fight for these reforms was disabled by reformism itself. The task of revolutionaries is to make the democratic and social gains of the working class permanent by linking single steps to a programme that can put them onto the path of revolution.

The reality of this can be seen in sharp focus in Scotland today. Here the working class has democratic aspiration and a militancy which we all know is sorely lacking in the working class in England and Wales. The Labour Party has responded by attempting to behead this movement, not with republicanism, but with a sop parliament. The majority taking Bob’s one step at a time approach has fallen in behind this. The majority of the left, primarily in the form of Scottish Militant Labour has followed Bob’s approach and dumped, what is in the context of Labour’s referendum, its minority demand for genuine self-determination and joined the campaign to turn a potentially revolutionary movement into a reformist one by saying ‘yes’ to the sop.

This is the method of Pitt who confuses the paralysation of revolutionary organisation with the paralysation of the class in the absence of such organisation. It is not the comrades around the Weekly Worker who are paralysed, but the class itself which is paralysed in Britain by Labourism. That is why the forging of revolutionary organisation, ie, the Communist Party, is vital in the here and now. It is vital not just in the minds of academics but in practice. The task of reforging that organisation is the first task of revolutionary socialists who take seriously the ability and the need of the class itself to be forged into a weapon for its own self-liberation.

The rejoinder that we should confine ourselves to joining the Labour Party because it is big and wins the atomised votes of the workers is hardly impressive. The Labour Party never has been a vehicle for class struggle, but rather an obstacle to it. In case anyone was in any doubt we only have to look back to two recent examples. During the miners’ strike of 1984-85 the Labour Party was the enemy within our movement, hence Ramsay McKinnock. Even more recently the Militant Tendency leaders of the anti-poll tax were rewarded with being witch hunted out of the party. Working class struggle itself has continually exposed the Labour Party as a barrier to self-liberation, not its vehicle. The problem is not, in that sense, the Labour Party, but the lack of any alternative, which has allowed it to act as the enemy within.

“Yes, our movement is indeed in its infancy, and in order that it may grow up faster, it must become imbued with intolerance against those who retard its growth by their subservience to spontaneity” (Ibid p52). Lenin argued against those who saw the only way out of the isolation of socialists was to submerge themselves into the spontaneous struggle around immediate economic demands rather than bringing socialist consciousness to the masses. Lenin impressed upon them then that socialists must be intransigent in “our primary and most imperative practical task, namely, to establish an organisation of revolutionaries capable of maintaining the energy, stability and continuity of the political struggle” (Ibid p 130).

The idea that communist organisation must await to some indeterminate utopian future, when workers by an act of sheer will become ready, is alien to Leninism. The forging of the revolutionary class is by definition a conscious process which has been continually stalled in the history of the working class in Britain by being subordinated to the bourgeois ideology of the Labour Party.

Helen Ellis
London

Editorial statement

In response to Anne Murphy’s letter to the Weekly Worker (July 3 1997), the editorial committee would like to restate the function of editorial control.

Articles which express particular viewpoints, political positions or political statements will not be altered by the committee, except if necessary for considerations of style, space or security in consultation with the author.

Journalist articles such as comrade Murphy’s report of a meeting may be altered considerably. As a rule consultation in this instance cannot be incorporated into the process of production of the paper. Nevertheless of course the editorial committee welcome all criticism and discussion of the paper whether formal or informal.

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