20.05.1999

Dr Who socialism

Delphi replies to Royston Bull, former vice-president of the Socialist Labour Party

Delphi’s brain cells, which had begun to heal after reading files of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review,have suffered a relapse as a result of Royston Bull’s attack (Weekly Worker May 6). Now this will be seen by Royston as further confirmation of SLP “philistinism … backwardness [and] anti-theory” in the face of irrefutable Marxist-Leninist science. In fact it is a result of trying to make sense of a series of propositions strung together in convoluted sentences without any logical argument. This effort is compounded by the subjectivism of Bull’s attack which attributes to Delphi positions not actually taken. Bull has got it into his head that Delphi is a “Trot” and a “Fiscite” and therefore knows what Delphi means better than Delphi does.

Delphi has chosen anonymity in order not to be painted into a factional corner and with the hope that the ideas will be treated objectively on their own merit. I must reiterate that I am not, nor ever have been a supporter of “Fisc” (The computer spell-check at this point suggests the word ‘fiasco’, which also sums up the writer’s own view). Nor is Delphi a “Trot”, despite an apprenticeship in the WRP at the time Bull was a leading Workers Press journalist and devoted Healyite. I reassert that the only label pinned on SLPers by the Weekly Worker which is appropriate to Delphi is NUMist and Scargillite - and certainly not adisillusioned one. These terms best encapsulate the historical origin of the SLP and reflect its political character. Delphi is proud to be associated with these positive tendencies in the labour movement. However, they do not adequately express Delphi’s Marxism or socialist world view.

Bull begins the attack with what he believes is a damning indictment - Delphi’s “anti-Leninism” . This, he claims, is expressed in the invention of a “false irreconcilable contradiction” between revolutionary theory and “solidarity action with workers”. Since Bull reveals in the first sentence that he has totally misunderstood Delphi’s argument, it does not bode well for the remainder of his polemic, which rapidly degenerates into a vitriolic attack on the internal regime of the SLP.

Delphi is not an “anti-Leninist”. This implies a total rejection of Lenin and Leninism in toto. Instead Delphi believes in a critical reappraisal of Lenin to distinguish which aspects of what Lenin said, wrote and did are relevant to the world today and what is only applicable to circumstances in tsarist Russia. This is not anti-Leninism. Indeed, it is the canonisation of Lenin which is anti-Leninist, reducing Lenin’s theory to a set of formulae divorced from the material conditions which gave birth to those ideas.

Delphi has certainly not asserted that there is an “irreconcilable contradiction” between revolutionary theory and workers’ struggles. This was the very criticism I aimed at Bull, who has no concept of practical action. Establishing the unity of theory and practice has proved the elusive holy grail of the British left. How do we make socialism appear relevant to working class and other oppressed people? How do we mobilise people towards its achievement?

Bull actually makes a virtue of his lack of dialogue with working class people in struggle. Delphi’s claim that the EPSR proposes no practical action other than “evangelising Marxist-Leninist science” is triumphantly greeted with “Absolutely correct ...” Supporting workers in practical ways is dismissed as a pastime for “Trots”. The only logic of Bull’s position is for socialists to say to those workers in struggle, who request support for demonstrations or pickets, ‘Sorry. No. Can’t support you. It would only be patronising of us. Get on with it yourself. However, if you want a visiting lecturer on Marxist-Leninist science … ‘If this is not “dumbed-down head-patting”, I don’t know what is. (In fact I am not sure what dumbing-down really is at all.)

It is Bull’s approach which denies a dialectical interaction between theory and practice, between propagating socialist ideas and promoting the struggles of the exploited and oppressed. If he will not take on board what Delphi says about learning from workers and starting from their real life experiences, perhaps he will heed Lenin. Lenin in fact, like a “patronising Trot”, “academic” (after all, he was only in direct contact with Russian proletarians for less than five years), actually visited workers and wrote leaflets for them about workplace conditions. Nadezhda Krupskaya describes how in 1894 she went disguised into the workers’ barracks of the Thornton worsted factory to gather material for such a leaflet. Lenin himself records grilling a worker on “every aspect” of a factory for one of his exposures of conditions.

“Vladimir Ilyich”, Krupskaya remembered,

“was interested in the minutest detail describing the conditions and life of the workers. Taking the features separately, he endeavoured to grasp the life of the worker as a whole - he tried to find what one could seize upon in order better to approach the worker with revolutionary propaganda. Most of the intellectuals of those days badly understood the workers … Vladimir Ilyich read with the workers from Marx’s Capital and explained it to them. The second half of the studies was devoted to the workers’ questions about their work and labour conditions. He showed them how their life was linked with the entire structure of society and told them in what manner the existing order could be transformed. The combination of theory with practice was the particular feature of Vladimir Ilyich’s work in the circles”(Delphi’s emphasis).

Krupskaya continues: “The method of agitation on the basis of the workers’ everyday needs became deeply rooted in our Party work” (N Krupskaya Memories of Lenin London 1970, p21). Clearly, Lenin did not think it “patronising” to talk to workers about their day-to-day lives and use this as the starting point for revolutionary propaganda and agitation. Lenin well knew that you do not win workers to socialism by declaiming theory, but only by patient work which relates to their practical experience. Bull on the other hand represents the modern manifestation of those 1890s Russian intellectuals who “badly understood the workers”.

Lenin also refutes Bull on what the latter contemptuously dismisses as “single-issue campaigns”: that is, responses by particular sections of the population to specific and concrete forms of oppression and exploitation:

“The question arises, what should political education consist in? Can it be confined to the propaganda of working class hostility to the autocracy? Of course not. It is not enough to explain to the workers that they are politically oppressed (any more than it is to explain to them that their interests are antagonistic to the interests of the employers). Agitation must be conducted with regard to every concrete example of this oppression … Inasmuch as this oppression affects the most diverse classes of society, inasmuch as it manifests itself in the most varied spheres of life and activity - vocational, civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc, etc … In order to carry on agitation round concrete instances of oppression, these instances must be exposed (as it is necessary to expose factory abuses in order to carry on economic agitation)” (original emphasis, VI Lenin ‘What is to be done’ SW Vol 1, p135).

He goes on to stress:

“Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse, no matter what class is affected - unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a social democratic point of view and no other” (ibid p145).

He considers the ideal revolutionary to be a “tribune of the people”,who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects ...” (ibid pp153-154).

It could not be any clearer. Revolutionary socialists must respond to those concrete forms of oppression which exist in a modern bourgeois democracy, as Lenin exhorted them to do in absolutist, bureaucratic, semi-feudal Russia. This means if black, gay, disabled, women, Irish, white collar workers, manual workers, tenants, environmentalists, or whoever, are conducting a campaign against some abuse or discrimination, we have a duty to support them in whatever way possible. To intervene in a specific campaign with the belief (even if unuttered) that they are only perpetuating illusions about the reformability of capitalism would be cynical and condescending in the extreme. But of course Bull does not have this problem, because he does not get involved in practical action, preferring to maintain his Olympian superiority wreathed in the pure clouds of Marxist-Leninist science.

As Lenin showed, praxis requires the rigorous analysis of the empirical facts of a situation, whether it is wages and conditions in a factory, or the nature of global imperialism. Where does Bull’s Marxist-Leninist theory lead him? Certainly not to the analysis of reality. To qualify as a science, a theory has to be verifiable by experiment and its results have to be reproduceable. Bull tells us that “Marxism-Leninism guided the only successful revolutionary overthrows of imperialist states [sic] that there have ever been …” What imperialist state - let alone the plural - has been overthrown? Russia was imperialist in a pre-capitalist sense, but certainly not in Leninist terms of “the highest stage of capitalism”.

No imperialist state has been overthrown by Marxism-Leninism - on this planet at least. On the planet Bull is living on perhaps! Of those states which were overthrown the result was not socialism, but the rise of a bureaucratic collectivist class whose historic role was to carry out the rapid industrialisation of previously imperialist-dominated economies. And while these societies had major progressive features and did in some cases form a counter-balance to imperialism, the irrefutable historical fact is they have failed, they have been defeated, they are no more. Despite this, Bull continues to try and nail them back on the perch. To ascribe the collapse of the Stalinist state-bureaucratic societies to “shallow temporary mass opinion in central Europe” is a statement of almost unbelievable fatuousness. Is this pronouncement the result of the application of “Marxist-Leninist science”? Or is it the result of a sclerotic ideology which refuses to recognise reality?

One other notorious example of this inability to keep his feet on political terra firma was published in Socialist News No13. While Sikorski was sulking in his tent and not issuing statements about developments in Ireland, Bull was handed the opportunity to describe the Good Friday peace agreement as a “national liberation triumph in Ireland… a colossal boost for workers [and] a tremendous victory for the working class”. Delphi has always considered Ireland to be the acid test of the British left’s understanding of imperialism. The only explanation is Bull was himself ‘on acid’ when he wrote this bizarre flight of fancy.

Bull reveals himself constantly as an out-and-out idealist, whose reality reflects the unfolding of his own ‘absolute idea’ - the inevitable and imminent collapse of imperialism and the dawn of socialism. Unfortunately his socialism is not even utopian, but dystopian, as he envisages a nightmare dictatorship of the high-priesthood of the sacred science. It is a cross between Saint-Simonism and the Daleks.

Delphi does not need the BBC (that is, the Cold War series, not Dr Who) to reveal the true barbaric and repressive nature of Stalinism. Delphi’s own rigorous Marxist analysis is sufficient, but fears that the brain cells and the patience of the reader has already been strained too much to elaborate further at this stage.

As almost half of Bull’s rant is devoted to attacking the SLP, this issue should also be addressed. But it is enough to say that Bull is being disingenuous in claiming he did not know what the score was when he stood as vice-president. He had no objections to the block vote and voiding of members when it was used to ban the black section and rout the “Trots”. And as for the claim that “the EPSR rejects factionalising too, then and now” - the palpable sectarian bitterness with which he attacks the supposed “Trot” Delphi and “Mafia-like” Scargillism speaks for itself.