09.04.1998
USSR school
Party notes
Participants judged the Party school on the USSR over the weekend of April 4-5 a success and one of the most useful we have organised in recent years. It was a pity that a series of unavoidable circumstances kept the numbers attending low, but the presence of comrades from other trends greatly enriched the debate. In particular, I would highlight the contributions of Phil Sharpe as consistently challenging and useful.
Over the two days, a great deal of material was analysed, many important theoretical questions aired. In this week’s report however, I want to look at a recurring theme of the school - the question of method, theoretical development and definition.
Opponents on the revolutionary left often accuse our organisation of being ‘agnostic’, or even ‘philistine’ concerning the key political question of the 20th century - the nature of the Soviet Union. The latest - and amongst the crudest - has been comrade Richard Brenner of Workers Power who tells our readers of “the CPGB’s insistence that there is something ‘bureaucratic’ or ‘sect-like’ about an organisation deciding on its policy after internal debate, and then requiring its members to fight publicly for the majority position” (Weekly Worker April 2).
With a dishonest - and laughably clumsy - sleight of hand, the comrade makes the profoundly complex and pivotal question of the nature of the Soviet Union a matter of binding “policy”, like perhaps our attitude to action around a particular demo, election or picket. It would be difficult for me to provide more conclusive evidence of the ‘sect-like’ nature of WP than comrade Brenner gives us every time he writes.
But what of this charge of ‘agnosticism’? In fact, our school made clear that we are striving for a collective view of this phenomenon. We do want the Communist Party to be characterised by an understanding of the nature of the USSR and the reasons for its failure. After all, this awareness will hopefully inform - though it need not be explicitly present in - our programmatic approach to the task of working class state power. The key question of the 20th century cannot be met with a shrug. However, unlike a sect, we will not make such an understanding a requirement of membership of the revolutionary party.
The two major alternative theories confronting us at the school were that of ‘orthodox’ Trotskyism - represented by the Marxist Bulletin - and the variant of state capitalism held by comrades of the Revolutionary Democratic Group and the Worker Communist Party of Iraq. Our essential criticism of these currents is of their flawed, atrophied method. Take for example the way that Trotskyism has laid hold of the man’s partial, unfinished definitions and categories and frozen them into vacuum-packed dogmas. A definition is a brief, logical description of a thing, stating what is perceived of as the essential distinctive properties determining its content and parameters. Definitions are thus indispensable tools for humanity’s comprehension of the world and the fight to change it.
However, they are conditional understandings, circumscribed by cultural levels, the data available and the stage the phenomenon being studied has reached in its process of development. Social phenomena therefore have no ‘fixed’ or ‘eternal’ elements or character but are subject to constant change. A definition can fix the superficial attributes of a thing at any given moment or period, and thus transform these attributes into something permanent and unchanging.
Definitions are rendered further contingent through the very nature of human cognition of a world characterised by flux and change. Lenin thus writes that “the representation of movement by means of thought always makes coarse, kills - and not only by means of thought, but also by means of perception, and not only movement but every concept” (VI Lenin CW Vol 38, pp259-60).
Trotsky’s provisional categories represent enormously profound attempts by a Marxist of genius to develop an understanding of a unique, totally unprecedented social phenomenon in the very course of its birth and consolidation. Trotsky’s problems were exacerbated by his conditions of exile and the extreme pressure from Stalin. But despite lapses, his thinking on the USSR continued to show flexibility and development. Hillel Ticktin considers that “logically, he was on a trajectory of gradually admitting the reality of the formation” of a system that could not be subsumed under the definition of ‘degenerated workers’ state’ ” (H Ticktin and M Cox The ideas of Leon Trotsky London 1995, p77).
Such a judgement has a degree of historical speculation to it, of course. Yet there is surely no excuse for those of us who have before us the beginning, the middle and end of the phenomenon that was the USSR and thus are able to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Trotsky.
Yet the vast bulk of the revolutionary left have viewed the collapse of the USSR and bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe simply as bland confirmations of their own particular theoretical shibboleths, whatever the facts scream at them. We believe that it is perhaps the key theoretical task of Marxism to account for the horrors that the first attempt to build a workers’ society produced. Despite the sanguine nature of the left, almost all conceptual models that have attempted to explain this unique social formation have proved either one-sided, or simply wrong.
We must surely use the empirical raw material now available to us to grasp its fundamental laws of motion. Any investigation which starts with the a priori method of simply hammering the available evidence into an existing definition is not simply useless to the working class; it is positively reactionary.
Mark Fischer
national organiser