27.11.1997
New LRCI, new twists
John Stone of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (LCMRCI) discusses the continuing theoretical decline of the Workers Power group
The Workers Power-dominated League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI) made more U-turns at its fourth congress in August. Just as New Labour moves to old liberalism, so New LRCI’s rightward shift is transforming it into another old-style sect.
It radically changed its line on two central programmatical issues. The first concerned the nature of the post-Stalinist states. Until July the LRCI had claimed that all the countries east of Germany were moribund workers’ states, but now they say that at least eight of them are capitalist.
The second was about the key question of the state:
“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” (Workers Power September).
WP readers and sympathisers had never before been informed of the existence of these two wings, an omission which shows a great contempt for them. This article will discuss first the origin of the two positions and then go on to deal with the two major programmatical shifts.
Workers Power was expelled from the International Socialists in 1975. In its first five years it remained state capitalist. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan, WP was shaken. Dave Hughes’ line of critical military support for the ‘left’ government and the USSR against the reactionary clerical Mujahedin won acceptance. Keith Harvey defended a line close to Tony Cliff’s and characterised the CIA-founded bands as a “national liberation movement” and supported their fight against “Soviet expansionism”. The two wings were on the opposite sides of the barricades over this question, which started the second Cold War. A decade later the fundamentalists which Harvey supported won the Afghan war and imposed a medieval regime.
This debate was linked to the nature of the Stalinist countries. Hughes showed that the former idea that they were a form of bourgeois state was completely wrong. Under his direction the group wrote in 1981-82 its programmatic pillar, The degenerated revolution. WP turned towards orthodox Trotskyism and enriched it with the idea that in eastern Europe, east Asia and Cuba the Stalinists, without ceasing to be a counterrevolutionary force in opposition to a revolution of workers’ councils, smashed the capitalist state and created a new bureaucratised workers’ state which needed a new political revolution.
Harvey did not want to break with anti-defencism and adopted a hybrid position between Cliff and Trotsky. Along with Cliff he claimed the state was bourgeois, while with Trotsky he said the economy was not bourgeois. This mish-mash serves to prepare the idea that the Stalinist states were brutal bourgeois dictatorships and that bourgeois democracy would therefore be progressive by comparison.
The defeat of the anti-defencists paved the road towards the transformation of WP into a healthy current, capable of becoming a pole of attraction for groups in Europe and in the Pacific. If Harvey had won, it would have been impossible to win any of these groups and to create the LRCI. WP would have disintegrated or been transformed into another Stalino-phobic sect.
In 1979-80 the launch of the second Cold War pushed WP to the left. A decade later, when imperialism triumphed and most of the left shifted towards the right, WP was unable to resist the pressure. Harvey, having accumulated power in the apparatus, decided to push WP back to Stalino-phobia. For years the comrades from the semi-colonial sections were his strongest opposition. After 1995 he managed to exclude and expel them. Nobody was then able to seriously oppose him.
With its last congress the LRCI is now a qualitatively different creature from the one founded in 1989. The LRCI was born with a clear revolutionary defencist strategy. It defended any oppressed nation and workers’ state against imperialism. Harvey’s revisions meant the New LRCI refused to defend Haiti and the Serbs against US and Nato troops.
From 1989 openly capitalist regimes were imposed throughout the former Soviet bloc. The LRCI was one of the few international currents which did not want to face reality, claiming that there remained a form of workers’ state. The only exception was the obvious case of the GDR, which in 1991 was completely swallowed up by imperialist Germany. The Manifesto of the Fourth Congress of the LRCI now claims that since 1989, “after four years or more capitalism has finally been restored in the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech and Slovak republics” (my emphasis).
If the LRCI now accepts that four years after the 1989 events capitalism was restored in many of these countries, it is clear that it has to accept that at least since 1993 it was completely wrong in maintaining that these were some sort of proletarian dictatorships.
Comrades who set up the Proletarian Faction and later the LCMRCI fought inside the LRCI, rejecting the notion that these countries remained workers’ states of any kind. They were ostracised or expelled. LRCI leaders do not want to give the LCMRCI any credit or allow it even restricted participation in their discussions.
The LRCI believed that the post-Trotsky Fourth International became centrist between 1948 and1951, and the roots of that deviation are based on the fact that it failed to quickly recognise the new states in post-war eastern Europe as degenerated workers’ states. However, the scale of the LRCI’s confusion is even greater. It delayed, according to its own admission, at least four years before realising the class reverse in the same states.
In 1982 Workers Power adopted The degenerated revolution. In that book it clearly stated:
“We define the class nature of the state, not by its form (which for all states can vary tremendously), nor even by the specific features of its apparatus, but by the economic regime, the mode of production that it defends.”
For Trotsky proletarian property relations were based on a nationalised and centrally planned economy in which the bourgeoisie was not allowed to retain its property; on a state monopoly of foreign trade, banking and big industry; and where money could not be used to buy private land or the means of production.
Consequently, when the state machinery no longer defends these post-capitalist relations and when it openly advocates the free market, we can no longer talk of any form of proletarian dictatorship (even a degenerated one). New incipient bourgeois states were created when openly anti-socialist regimes were set up in the east, and they started a process of capitalist accumulation.
According to Trotsky and The degenerated revolution,it is not possible to talk about any form of proletarian dictatorship when such states are ruled by direct agents of the emerging bourgeoisie and imperialism. That is the case in all the states in eastern Europe and the former USSR. Only in Cuba and the Far East can we talk of degenerated workers’ states - they are making heavy concessions to multinationals, but still maintain the planned economy and the rule of the bureaucratic caste.
For Harvey there is no great distinction between a bourgeois and a degenerated workers’ state. The only major difference is a purely economic one. For a number of years Harvey characterised all the eastern European states as ‘moribund workers’ states’. A moribund state is a decadent one in which the economy is in rapid decline. However, in one or two of these states, after the introduction of capitalist incentives, the economy was growing at a higher rate than in any other European country. How it was possible to continue considering them moribund?
Harvey - an empiricist - was forced to recognise that the most successful post-Stalinist countries could no longer be described as any form of moribund workers’ state. Yet he continues to apply without any serious basis the ‘moribund’ characterisation to half of eastern Europe and to 12 of the former 15 Soviet republics.
Harvey believed that the overthrow of the Stalinist regimes would open up a world revolutionary period of even greater intensity than the one created after World War II. However, from the late 1940s capitalism was overthrown in countries whose population makes up one third of humanity. These revolutions weakened imperialism and created better conditions for the liberation movements in the colonies and for working class advance in the west. After 1989, far from seeing social revolutions, we have experienced the worst social counterrevolutions. How can the LRCI continue talking of a world revolutionary period in which the most important conquest in human history (the workers’ state) is being liquidated?
For Trotsky and The degenerated revolution the consequence of characterising a state as a degenerated workers’ state is the struggle to regenerate it through a political revolution which maintains the nationalised and planned economy, while overthrowing bureaucratic rule. It also imposes an obligation to side with the hated bureaucracy against the forces of an even worse enemy: internal and external social counterrevolution. For Harvey the degenerate workers’ state is only a label which does not oblige him to adopt any particular policy in consequence. For example, the LRCI still claims that Serbia is a workers’ state. Therefore, to be consistent, it ought to have defended it against even the slightest imperialist incursion. However, when Nato launched its fiercest attack ever, the LRCI said that it could not defend Serbia, and even called on the imperialist powers to give military support to their regional puppets.
For Harvey it is possible to continue talking about a form of workers’ state which is ruled by ultra-reactionaries and private millionaires. The LRCI characterised Republika Srpska forces as fascist, but said that it remained a form of workers’ state. In Albania the LRCI said that the bourgeoisie was in power and that the task of the revolution was to expropriate it. In that case it is no longer possible to talk about political revolution (which only aims to regenerate the state), but of a social revolution to eliminate the ruling class. We ought to be talking about an Albanian bourgeois state which must be smashed.
The last LRCI congress resolved to reject The degenerated revolution. According to the new theory it adopted, no eastern state ever ceased to be bourgeois, and in the USSR a bourgeois counterrevolution took place in 1927. For Harvey the post-war social revolutions, instead of smashing the bourgeois states, purged and improved them. Harvey appears to believe in a bourgeois state that is capable of expropriating the bourgeoisie yet later returns its property. The relation between the capitalist state and its ruling class is not like a man and his shirt. Anyone can take off their shirt and remain the same. The relation between the bourgeois state and the bourgeoisie is like flesh and blood: they cannot be separated.
Bernstein and the reformists had the idea that the bourgeois state was capable of replacing the bourgeoisie. Lenin combated that revision. A state which smashes the bourgeoisie can not be described as bourgeois. For Harvey however if a commune-style semi-state does not exist, there is a bourgeois state. With that idealistic view he should be attacking Lenin, not Stalin, for overthrowing the workers’ state. That is the position advocated by Wolforth - the man from whom Harvey admits he took his theory. It was Lenin who dissolved factions, diminished soviet democracy, hired tens of thousands of tsarist officials and functionaries, created a vertical army and imposed the Party’s dictatorship. Wolforth said that Lenin should have convened pluralist elections a là Nicaragua and then, if he had lost to the right, that at least would have prevented the outcome of Stalinism.
If a bourgeois counterrevolution was imposed in the USSR in 1927, as Harvey says, it means that everything Trotsky did after his expulsion was completely wrong. Trotsky said that Stalinism did not become a counterrevolutionary force until 1935. Up to 1933 Trotsky tried to regenerate the Communist International and he set up the international Left Opposition. If Harvey had any degree of consistency, he would have to say that Trotsky was wrong and that the whole basis of the Fourth International was a cracked pillar. He should not have fought inside Comintern or the CPSU.
Today the LRCI contains a big contradiction. On the one hand it hailed the replacement of the bureaucracy by openly capitalist regimes, and on the other hand it now accepts that this represented an “historical defeat”.
In the imperialist heartland the LRCI always votes for social democracy, even after it has been in power for years attacking the workers. It says that it is important to be with the workers’ reformist organisations against the right. However, in the workers’ states it sided with capitalist parties against the bureaucrats (who had some parasitic allegiance to the post-capitalist relations).
The worst problem is Harvey’s attitude towards bourgeois democracy. For Trotsky and Hughes it was preferable to have any form of workers’ state - even under the totalitarian terrorist, Stalin - rather than a bourgeois parliamentary democracy. For Harvey, Stalin imposed a fascistic regime in a non-capitalist bourgeois state. It would have been better to have had a bourgeois democratic regime than an authoritarian one. That idea led Harvey to theorise the necessity of building a united front with all the pro-imperialist parties in the east to impose bourgeois democracy. The new parliamentary regimes were the best way to win popular support for the final destruction of the post-capitalist states.
In 1989 revolutionaries should have been with the workers in the upheavals against Stalinist rule. However, at every moment they needed to say that the worst enemy was capitalist restoration and that it was impossible to make any bloc with the restorationists.
Harvey’s theories result from a desire to accommodate to post-Cold War public opinion inside the imperialist democracies. When most of the international left is saying that authoritarianism and not imperialism is the main enemy, the LRCI, instead of fighting that trend, adapts to it. State capitalism and orthodox theories are at least consistent. If you describe Stalinist rule as degenerate workers’ states, you must call for their defence against capitalism. If you think they were capitalist, you should not defend them, but celebrate their downfall. Harvey’s theories have no such consistency.
The Harveyite New LRCI confuses political revolution with social revolution and mistakes social counter-revolution for pro-democracy revolution. For the LRCI there is no distinction between the state in a bourgeois and a Stalinist country.
The LRCI characterises the present period as a revolutionary one, but this is based on its incompatible opposite: a counterrevolutionary situation.
In London Tony Blair is destroying the reformist nature of the Labour Party created by Keir Hardy. In the same city the revolutionary international inspired by Hughes is being transformed into an eclectic and inconsistent sect by Keith Harvey.