11.09.1997
Long live the party line!
Around the left
We have long complained about the revolutionary left’s allergy to openness. Naturally, this anti-openness is accompanied by a chronic sectarianism, which is regrettably a defining feature - still - of the left movement. These groups seem to believe they have access to a ‘revealed truth’, in a manner similar to religious cults and movements.
It is inevitable then that all these neo-cults practise,to some degree or another, bureaucratic centralism, not democratic centralism. Bureaucratic centralism is a necessity if you want to maintain and sustain a sect, and promote a sect world view.
One of the worst offenders - though possibly not the worst offender - is Workers Power, the hegemonic component of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International. It is a consummate master of the ‘behind closed doors’ approach to revolutionary politics and theory in general. It likes to keep any real debates purely internal, hence secret. This is WP’s version of ‘democratic centralism’, which it claims is in the tradition of Leon Trotsky.
As a result, WP is susceptible to sudden, sometimes violent, line changes. When the new line emerges, it is all rather a mystery to the outsider. There are no reports or discussions in the press of the minority position or how the majority view came to win the day. Crucially, there is no systematic analysis of the differences between the minority and the majority, and within the organisation as a whole. This was beautifully illustrated by its spectacular and bureaucratic ‘Scottish turn’. At the end of [text corrupted in archive file] conference had “debated Workers Power’s position on Scotland and voted to change it. Previously we called for a referendum on the question of a sovereign assembly, but conference decided it is now necessary to call for the immediate establishment of a such an assembly. The resolution is printed below” (December 1996). That was it, end of debate - thank you and goodnight. The (new) minority view and the internal differences over this dramatic shift were not discussed or even mentioned.
Hence the rather dull Workers Power, with its sporadic pot shots at the rest of the left, with its occasional Delphic reference to internal debate and dispute. Its theoretical publication, Trotskyist International, tends to be the same - just writ larger, and exists mainly to hammer home the ‘party line’, not enlighten its readership and the movement as a whole.
Workers Power informs us that the LRCI held its six-day congress in August, with 35 delegates from its eight sections. It proudly states: “The congress of the LRCI, held every two to three years, is a living expression of international democratic centralism”, and informs us that congress was a “collective expression of the membership” (September).
But where were the discussion documents, articles and polemic before the fourth congress took place? Why did nothing appear in Workers Power? You can guarantee that there were numerous papers, but it appears that only the elect are allowed to study them. Apparently WP’s general readership, the revolutionary movement and the working class in general do not matter - or exist.
For all of WP’s ready access to the truth, the political positions reached at its Vienna congress are as confusing and contradictory as ever. Some things never change. Workers Power reports:
“This congress reaffirmed our analysis of the new general period which began in 1989-91 as one of greater instability and revolutionary upheavals than the post-war period of 1949 to 1989. It also reaffirmed our recognition of the seriousness of the defeats which the capitalist restoration process in Eastern Europe and China has inflicted. A resolution that recognised that capitalism has been newly restored [how newly? - DP] in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and the Baltic states, as well as the imminence of restoration in a number of other states, was debated and passed” (my emphasis).
Well, if you were generous you could say that WP is slowly getting there ... This resolution amounts to theoretical promiscuity, of course. WP is desperately trying to cover itself from all sides. We have to presume, it seems, that Russia, Bulgaria, Rumania, etc are still “moribund workers’ states”, to use WP’s own nonsensical formulation. A totally eclectic hodgepodge is the result here, not clarity. Hilariously, the report talks about “delegates and observers returning to their sections armed with a clear set of priorities” and how the congress as a whole helped in “sharpening the programme and tactics which will guide our work”.
We also get the usual blend of inevitablism and ‘official optimism’ - so resonant of ‘official communism’ before it - that we expect from the Trotskyist school. They know - somehow - that working class defeats “do not lie ahead”; they have “already been experienced in the previous period”. It almost goes without saying that things have never been better for WP and the LRCI. Hence, the fourth congress “registered the successes of the League over the last three years. Despite the desertion of the Bolivian section and half of the New Zealand section in 1995, the LRCI has more than recovered its numbers and is larger now than it was before the splits.” Certainly a positive spin on events, you have to admit.
The most interesting part of the report is tucked away near the end:
“Lastly, the fourth congress took up again an issue which had been debated at the LRCI’s third congress: the nature of the state form in the degenerate workers’ states. This involves the question of whether the state machine was smashed, in the Marxist sense of the term, during the post-war overthrow of capitalism in Eastern Europe, China, Indochina and Cuba, and the related question of whether the state machine had to be smashed to allow capitalism to be restored in the post-1989 period.
“At the fourth congress, the former minority position secured a narrow majority. The congress adopted the view that the bureaucratic Stalinist overturns took place without the smashing of the bourgeois form of state apparatus” (my emphasis).
We have to leave aside completely for now the theoretical implications of such a resolution (surely the “bourgeois form of state apparatus” was smashed to smithereens during the course of World War II, before the Red Army rolled in?). It is impossible not to notice, however, WP’s linguistic trickery at work - “state form” and “form of state” can mean almost anything you want it to. This leaves WP with a permanently available ideological escape route.
The real point is that the above statement graphically reveals WP’s sect methodology. WP/LRCI have adopted this view more in the manner of an ideological/theoretical coup than in the spirit of scientific investigation. This furtiveness is useless for the workers’ movement. It would have been valuable if WP had discussed in detail the differences between the minority and the majority positions. Instead, it treats us like children, who can only be allowed so much information at a time - a bit like the 9pm TV watershed. It would also have been nice if WP had openly admitted before that there was a such a minority position, and what its views were.
What makes it all the more outrageous is that Workers Power actually makes the following promise: “These changes in analysis will be set out in an article in the forthcoming issue of Trotskyist International”. But when you eagerly open up the said journal all you get is a very long article by comrade Keith Harvey - apparently a proponent of the “former minority position”, though you would have to be a bit of a psychic to know that - on Russia, in which he castigates those who are “too enmeshed in reliving the mistakes of the past to care about innovating within the Marxist method”. There is also an equally long and meandering piece by comrade Peter Main on China, where he boldly affirmss that “what the Beijing Stalinists intend to create corresponds very closely to the corporatist economic model of fascism” (July-December). Nowhere do you find a report on the various positions adopted or a frank appraisal of the lines of demarcation, whatever Workers Power might say. Do those who subscribe to the former majority position, and now find themselves in the minority, have to pretend they no longer exist?
What we saw in Vienna, and reflected in the pages of Workers Power, was ‘party ideology’ at work. The LRCI’s (new) historical and theoretical evaluation on the ex-USSR, Eastern Europe, etc will quickly filter down to its respective parts and become ‘official’ doctrine. The previous line will fade from memory and will almost certainly not find life in the pages of Workers Power and Trotskyist International - and to judge by past history if any sceptic in WP wants to retain their membership, it would be very advisable to keep quiet.
The party line is dead. Long live the party line.
Don Preston