Letters

Ethical praxis

Phil Sharpe's response to Delphi is very welcome (Weekly Worker January 20). Nevertheless, his criticisms appear as sweeping claims against the supposed sub-text of what Delphi is supposed to be saying, without any detailed refutation of what has actually been said.

Firstly, Delphi does not deny the existence of "law-governed processes". Of course the universe is governed by physical laws, otherwise we would be lost in utter chaos. Laws also apply to the development of human society. Some of these applying to capitalism, like the law of value Phil refers to, have been, if not actually discovered, at least elaborated by Marx and Marxists.

But the question arises, and has not been answered by Phil, how 'scientific' is the Marxist analysis of capitalism, given that the actual course of capitalist development has not been predicted by Marxists? Galileo, Newton and Darwin discovered certain laws that provided the basis for further scientific discoveries, but their theories at the time did not comprehend the whole picture. Gramsci et al do not provide the whole truth about the development of imperialism - and on some historical and economic questions were completely wrong. Consequently we have to criticise, and again criticise, all their theories in the light of subsequent changes in the real world. Both this act of criticism and the real world processes arising from human activity are forms of praxis. That is why Delphi places this concept at the centre of Marxism. Marxism is nothing, if not a philosophy of thorough action. It also means the criticism of what passes for Marxism itself.

But praxis, and the ethical dimension of praxis Phil is so dismissive of, have another importance. Suppose the law of value and all the other laws identified by Marx as governing the historical development of capitalism are indeed scientific laws. Suppose the proletariat has the historically determined task of acting as the gravedigger of capitalism and establishing socialism. How does knowledge of these laws enable us to actually change society? And, if the reply to that is by building a revolutionary party to make the working class conscious of its role, how in reality do we build such a party? Possession of the scientific knowledge is not itself a guarantee of success, as many ineffectual and ephemeral sects have discovered. We are dealing not with automatons that respond to the dictates of historical laws, but with thinking, feeling, sentient, and not always rational, human beings.

Although some people decide to become revolutionaries as the result of a considered, logical decision to implement social laws of development, most people who engage in revolutionary activity do so because they think it is right. That is, it is a moral decision. And even for those who believe they are conforming to the laws of history, that too is a moral choice. It is a choice made because the goal of transforming society, and building a new system, is seen as having some superior benefit. It is a desire for a better society, howbeit one determined by history, a desire which is nevertheless also a utopian and ethical striving. It is, if you like, an expression of objective utopianism.

It is this loss of emphasis on the utopian dimension of socialism, and of Marx, which Delphi is pointing to, not any idealist, subjective ethic. We have surrended the moral high ground to the enemy too often. We have expounded a vision of socialism which is bounded by cold, scientific laws of technological and economic development. The human aspect of unfettering the spirit and creating a new society has been subordinated to state Taylorism and Fordism. Whole aspects of human relations have been suppressed, almost with embarrassment, by the philistine, workerist left. Where are not only the discussions of our socialist ethics, but also aesthetics and even erotics?

These, Phil, are indeed "located in existing material social relations". This struggle for a socialist ethic, to win oppressed people over to the revolutionary transformation of society, is located in practical action - in praxis. This is where the objective laws of imperialist reality impact on people and where they respond. People resolve to change capitalism not because Marx, or scientific laws, have pronounced a death sentence on it. Not because they become aware they are appointed agents of social change. People fight imperialism because it is unjust, because they want a better life that allows them to flourish as human beings. Each one wants his or her own utopia. There will be no renaissance of socialism until we learn that and put it in the forefront of our theory and practice.

Ethical praxis

Hadrian's socialism

To paraphrase the inscription on a tombstone in Highgate, "The Phil Sharpists have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." The brain behind the Trotskyist Unity Group might want to protest that this was written before Marx became a scientific socialist. Wrong. While he had some way to go in honing his science over the next 38 years, Marx had already found his true path.

As if to hammer home the point made in this epitaph, this permanent reminder of the revolutionary core of scientific socialism, Engels' graveside eulogy summed up the life of his friend thus: "Marx was above all else a revolutionary." Little room for doubt then. Not everyone is convinced though. By attempting to suck Marxism dry of its very lifeblood, Phil dishes up to us its very negation: dry-as-dust scholasticism. Having said this, on almost every substantial criticism he levelled against Allan Armstrong (Weekly Worker January 27), Phil hits the nail on the head.

Phil is clearly wrong to cast doubt on the possibility of abolishing the wages system, even as a long-term project. Allan is even more mistaken in implying that it can immediately be positively transcended. As the Bolshevik's tragic experiment with 'war communism' demonstrated, the best that can be achieved by 'uprooting' the law of value in an isolated state is descent into a system of barter or a crude egalitarian 'communism', providing fertile conditions for revival of all the "old crap": classes, states, etc.

Phil has also identified a quite remarkable misunderstanding in Allan's reading of the Critique of the Gotha programme". According to this extremely important document, in the initial phase of communism (socialism), although exploitation is done away with, wages (economic incentives, rewarding workers for work actually carried out) are not: bourgeois right remains utterly intact in the labour process. As Marx made entirely explicit, no egalitarian utopia is going to blossom on day one of the revolution. To positively transcend the wages system requires a society where people will labour under the principle, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". Although wages cannot be abolished at the stroke of a pen, they will, in effect, wither away - along with the state - as they become progressively pointless. And they will become pointless, given that free provision of health, education, childcare and water will be extended to cover housing, transport, food. When what today are considered luxuries (even in the advanced economies) become abundant (if collective) property accessible to everyone, reliance on economic incentives to make people work will lose all meaning.

But such an (entirely realistic) abolition of the wages system also requires something else: an entirely different generation of human material - people not corrupted by even a trace of the egotism, selfishness, petty jealousies bred into us all by capitalist competitiveness. This will necessitate a world where the productivity of labour becomes, even by today's standards, phenomenal. It has to be able to allow us to reduce socially necessary labour time to a point where productive activity (safe and mentally challenging) will be given freely because it will cease to be alienated labour. Only then will humanity truly make the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom; only then will the all-important division between mental and manual labour be abolished; only then will even the semi-state, the commune state, bite the dust; only then will every cook govern.

Face the facts, Allan. An isolated workers' republic, moving in this direction (even at Bukharin's infamous "snail's pace") with most of the owners/controllers of the global economy in the hands of the international capitalist class ... Now that is what I call a utopia. A genuinely democratic, but isolated, Scottish workers' republic would become a shining beacon, an inspiration, a powerful example for workers throughout the capitalist world. No question about it. For precisely that very reason, it would be targeted by the imperialists, just as Soviet Russia was. What the US government has done to Cuban cigars, the entire capitalist world would do to Scottish whisky. Silicon Glen would find that essential supplies become 'unavailable'. All our markets would dry up. International credit would disappear. Even without 17 foreign armies drawing the working class away from essential productive labour, an "independent socialist Scotland" would fall prey, from day one, to 101 devastating shortages.

Workers who have, consciously, taken power into their own hands can be persuaded to tolerate short-term shortages and many other hardships. But only on condition that they see light at the end of the tunnel. If they lose confidence that the vanguard of the class has any strategy to win the class war on the international arena, if they perceive nothing on the horizon other than permanent hardship, then they will grasp any alternative presented to them, however reactionary. Mass emigration (especially of indispensable skilled labour) will become a devastating problem for the revolutionary regime, as indeed will sabotage. The only alternative to spreading the revolution would be to erect a new Berlin (or Hadrian's) Wall. For a victorious working class, spreading the revolution beyond its own national borders is not a moral, but a material imperative. International socialist revolution is indispensable because it both decreases the powerfulness of its hostile environment and gives new impetus to the revolutionary wave throughout the planet (proving that the first revolution was not some freak accident).

While there might appear, to the casual observer, to be little separating my position from Phil's, nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to the so-called objective (in reality contemplative materialist) analyses and prognoses of Phil, Allan's problem is not the (entirely legitimate) emphasis he places on the revolutionary struggle of the masses, and of the class conscious vanguard. His elementary error is his mislocation of the section of the international working class whose revolutionary struggle is key to moving towards socialism and communism. It is high time Allan appreciated that, far from constituting an excuse for revolutionaries holding back workers in one part of the global economy from seizing any realistic opportunity to take state power, the slogan of international socialism is an expression of the moral duty of communists. It is their duty to lead the workers in solidarity with any besieged workers' republic, to paralyse all attempts at imperialist intervention.

Because Allan (unlike Phil) is "above all else a revolutionary", he does not need to convince me that he would organise workers' solidarity with any genuinely democratic workers' republic, or that he would call for such international solidarity if workers took power in Scotland. His weakness is in failing to recognise the full significance of such international solidarity.

I agree with Phil that Allan's national road to socialism is idealist, utopian, ultra-left, voluntarist. But revolutionaries who suffer from an infantile disorder can be helped to mature: Lenin educated hundreds of thousand of subjectively revolutionary workers to outgrow their infantilism. Contemplative materialists, on the other hand, bereft as they are of any conception that "human activity is itself objective activity", who founder in blissful ignorance of the truth that, "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice", are unfit for playing any positive role at all. On the contrary, their bookish elitism can do nothing but harm to our cause. It can only alienate workers from Marxism by giving them the false impression that it is not a guide to action but an alien dogma, utterly useless from the point of view of workers' own material interests.

Hadrian's socialism
Hadrian's socialism

Republic and RCN

It was with a sense of growing astonishment that I read Allan Armstrong's criticisms of my RCN report (Weekly Worker January 13 and February 3). Allan claims the commitment of the Red Republicans to the overthrow of the monarchy throughout the UK is no novel departure. Correct me if I am wrong, Allan, but my understanding is that every previous Scottish Socialist Alliance/Scottish Socialist Party conference motion from your colleagues failed to mention any commitment to the overthrow of the monarchy south of the border.

I would be grateful to Allan if he (and Mary Ward) would take the trouble to read my reports prior to criticising them. Allegedly, I presented myself as alone in understanding the meaning of our agreed motion on republicanism! Nowhere did I make such an idiotic claim. I was in fact labouring under the apprehension (a false one, it turns out) that everyone was clear as to what we had agreed. Having read first Mary's letter and now Allan's, there is not much doubt that we all voted for very different things.

I am also supposed to have accused everyone, bar myself, of "making unprincipled compromises or [having] finally seen the light". More nonsense. The only way Allan could justify such a claim would be by arguing that all compromises are, by definition, "unprincipled".

Allan ought to have noticed that I listed two compromises of my own. I agreed that the RCN's refusing to set any threshhold below which factions have no special rights could cost us dear at conference, but that, in the spirit of unity, I would abide by the majority decision.

As for being charged with accusing comrades of "seeing the light", this is Alice in Wonderland stuff. I did write the following: "In the process of democratic debate, minds were changed." I made no claim to being an exception to this rule: I was not. And, if Allan wants to argue that it is a sign of strength for communists to enter debates with closed minds, I beg to differ.

I would suggest that Allan's memory is playing tricks on him. According to his account, his only intervention in the debate on republicanism was to "question to validity of the last phrase, 'free from all vestiges of feudalism'". If he thinks carefully, he might recall also arguing that while he would prefer the Campaign for a Federal Republic's term 'modern democratic republic' to be replaced with 'workers' republic', he could live with the alternative, 'socialist republic'. I particularly remember him saying this because I immediately backed him up.

It would, though, be utterly disingenuous of Allan to deny that, once this debate got underway, all his associates piled in alongside everyone else behind the criticism of this term. While I would argue that the situation is more complicated where the CPGB are concerned, the CFR interpret both the 'federal republic' and 'democratic republic' as bourgeois republics.

As is made clear on page 54 of the Communist Tendency's programme, Allan agrees with the position set out in State and revolution that it is sheer fantasy to suppose that communists simply want quantitative, or even qualitative, increases in democracy - a position confined (according to Lenin) to 'petty bourgeois opportunists'.

Although Allan agrees with me on these key points, he protests that, had members of the Glasgow Marxist Forum raised no objections to the RCN committing itself to a "slave-holders' republic", he would have happily endorsed the CFR position! Allan argues that it would have been a "very shallow political victory" for the Republicans formerly known as Red to have used their numerical strength to achieve a so-called political ambush of the CFR. I am beginning to sense that the RCN might have been cobbled together around an unprincipled non-aggression pact: in return for granting Allan the right to veto the RCN's embracing "international socialism", Mary, Nick Clarke and Dave Craig were given leave to lumber the lot of us with their Stalinist stages theory.

For the record, I honestly thought that Mary and Nick voted to replace the term 'modern democratic republic' with 'genuinely democratic workers' republic' because everyone else had mustered arguments that finally convinced them. If they remained unconvinced, then they ought to have had the guts to vote against. That is what I would have done.

Republic and RCN
Republic and RCN