10.05.2000

Tony Cliff May 20 1917 - April 9 2000

A 20th century revolutionary - part IV

Having asked why Tony Cliff was so determined to belittle Lenin and paint him a Menshevik prior to 1917, I answered in part three of this article that - along with the whole school of orthodox Trotskyism - basically the answer is to be found in Cliff's own economistic approach to "contemporary politics", whereby democratic questions are viewed at best as secondary, if not ghastly traps to be avoided. As promised, I will now expand on this answer in this the fourth, concluding, part.

To all intents and purposes the role of revolutionaries in a country like ours was seen by Cliff as twofold. In the here and now support and give a Socialist Workers Party coloration to bread and butter issues like the minimum wage and trade union rights. That is practical politics, which, in spite of the grandiloquent phrases about the transitional method and the logic of the struggle, remain firmly within the narrow horizon of the present system and the UK constitutional monarchy state. Then in the indefinite future lies the socialist millennium. As there is no revolutionary situation in Britain, that exists in the realm of propaganda where the ideologically defined sects engage in a primeval battle for supremacy - the SWP appearing as of this moment triumphant over once mighty rivals: eg, 'official communism', the WRP founded by Gerry Healy, and Peter Taaffe's disintegrating Socialist Party in England and Wales.

The minimum, or immediate, programmatic demand for a federal republic and a "more generous democracy" advanced by the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB never had a place in comrade Cliff's world view. The only republic Cliff was willing to countenance was the socialist republic. In the meantime his SWP gave a left gloss, or alibi, for Blair's and his programme. The SWP campaigned for and enthusiastically welcomed the election of the Blair government in May 1997. Subsequently the SWP called for a 'yes' vote in the Scottish and Welsh referendums; a 'yes' vote over the Good Friday deal for Northern Ireland; and a 'yes' vote for the 'presidential' Greater London mayor. Put another way, initiative around high politics was left to New Labour, top civil servants and the bourgeois establishment.

Lenin is very inconvenient for this outlook. He constantly stressed the centrality of programme. The Bolsheviks were committed to a minimum or immediate programme whereby the working class would exercise hegemony in the struggle for democracy and a republic in Russia; something to be crowned by the revolutionary seizure of power by the workers at the head of the peasant masses (the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry).

In marked contrast Cliff eschewed any kind of programme. That is, until 1998, when the SWP's 'Action programme' was first published. Here we find a list of unexceptional minimalist demands: stopping closures and the nationalisation of failed concerns; a 35-hour week with no loss of pay; a £4.61 minimum wage; ending privatisation; repealing the anti-trade union laws; state control over international trade in order to curb speculation; an increase in welfare spending and slashing the arms bill; full employment so as to boost demand. To provide authority the 'Action programme' was backed with reference to the Comintern's 'Theses on tactics' agreed at its 3rd Congress in June 1921 and Trotsky's 1934 'A programme of action for France' (see A Callinicos International Socialism No81, winter 1998; and J Rees Socialist Review January 1999). But the boldest claim is that it was premised on essentially the same conditions which prompted Trotsky's 1938 Transitional programme. This came from Tony Cliff himself (see T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, p82).

4.1. Transitional programme

As I remarked in part three, Cliff distinguished himself from orthodox Trotskyism in that in the immediate aftermath of World War II he was able to recognise the palpable reality of capitalist boom and the inappropriateness of Trotsky's Transitional programme. In my view Trotsky was badly mistaken even in 1938. He believed that capitalism was in terminal decline. Capitalism was in its "death agony" (L Trotsky The transitional programme New York 1997, p111). It could no longer develop the productive forces or grant meaningful reforms. The introduction of new machines and technology provided no answer to chronic stagnation. Nor in general can there be in the epoch of "decaying capitalism" systematic social reforms or the raising of the masses' living standards. Therefore, Trotsky concluded, defence of existing economic gains through demanding a "sliding scale of wages" and hours would virtually spontaneously trigger a final and apocalyptic collision with capitalism (ibid p115). The question of democracy was likewise reduced to merely defence of the existing "rights and social conquests of workers" (ibid p115).

In outlining his programme of transitional demands Trotsky takes to task the minimum-maximum programmes of "classical" social democracy. Most doctrinaire Trotskyites interpret this scholastically, as a final judgement handed down from on high, damning the minimum-maximum programme per se.

Of course, as already mentioned and extensively discussed in part three, the Bolsheviks too had a minimum programme. It mapped out a road under conditions of tsarist autocracy which would culminate in a democratic republic born of a popular revolution. Economically the minimum programme did not envisage Russia instantly going beyond the norms of capitalist commodity production. Nevertheless at the level of regime Russia was to be ruled over by the working class in alliance with the peasant masses. State power in the form of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship (rule) of the proletariat and peasantry was the bridge which united the minimum and maximum sections of the programme. The Bolsheviks were committed to using the salient of state power to help spark the socialist revolution in the countries of advanced capitalism. With the aid of the socialist west Russia could then embark on the transition to socialism (the first stage of communism) without the necessity of a second, specifically socialist, revolution. The workers' and peasants' revolution against tsarism would thereby - given the right internal and external conditions and circumstances - be made permanent. It would proceed uninterruptedly from the tasks of political democracy to the maximum programme and the tasks of leaving behind commodity production, the wages system and bourgeois right.

The fall of the tsar in February 1917 and the emergence of a protracted dual power situation - a bourgeois provisional government (class content being determined by politics not personnel) alongside which stood the workers' and peasants' soviets - caused Lenin to modify - not, as Cliff erroneously contends, "break" with - his minimum programme. The revolutionary dictatorship (rule) of the workers and peasants was concretised in the slogan, 'All power to the workers', soldiers' and peasants' soviets'. Trotsky's latter-day disciples - Cliff included - have woefully misrepresented the history of Bolshevism and Leninism. In so doing they stupidly reject as a matter of supposed principle the concept of a minimum section of the party programme: ie, a logically designed series of immediate demands and perspectives under the socio-economic conditions of capitalism, which in their orchestrated fulfilment transform the workers into a class that is ready to seize state power.

As an aside that explains why in International Socialism No81, Alex Callinicos can quote Comintern's 'Theses on tactics' and simultaneously claim it as a repudiation of the minimum programme per se and as a pretext for the SWP's 'Action programme', which is in actual fact nothing more than a minimalist programme of the centrist type - easily met within capitalism, and within the existing constitution to boot. The crucial question of state power is entirely absent. Let us quote Callinicos's quote:

"The communist parties do not put forward minimum programmes which could serve to strengthen and improve the tottering foundations of capitalism. The communists' main aim is to destroy the capitalist system. But in order to achieve their aim the communist parties must put forward demands expressing the immediate needs of the working class. The communists must organise mass campaigns to fight for these demands regardless of whether they are compatible with the continuation of the capitalist system. The communist parties should be concerned not with the viability and competitive capacity of capitalist industry or the stability of the capitalist economy, but with proletarian poverty, which cannot and must not be endured any longer ... In place of the minimum programme of centrism and reformists, the Communist International offers a struggle for the concrete demands of the proletariat which, in their totality, challenge the power of the bourgeoisie, organise the proletariat and mark out the different stages of the struggle for its dictatorship" (A Alder [ed] Theses, resolutions and manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International London 1980, pp285-6).

Clearly the target of Comintern is not the minimum programme as such. Rather it is the minimum programme of "socialisation or nationalisation" put forward by the centrists and reformists - which was to be achieved peacefully in an attempt to ameliorate the conditions of the workers, boost demand and thereby stabilise society (ibid p285). As the resolution explicitly states, the understanding that capitalism cannot bring about the "long-term improvement of the proletariat" does not imply that the workers have to "renounce the fight for immediate practical demands until after it has established its dictatorship" (ibid p285). Quite the reverse.

Equally the intended target of Trotsky's 1938 attack on the minimum programme was not Leninism, but pre-World War I social democracy epitomised by the German party of Bebel, Kautsky, Bernstein, Noske, David and Scheidemann. Like the Bolsheviks it arranged its programme - written by Kautsky - in two sections. The minimum programme "limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society" - furthermore, it must be emphasised, these reforms were within the framework of kaiserdom. As Engels, and in her turn Luxemburg, bitterly complained, the timorous minimum programme of German social democracy declined to even raise the republican demand for the abolition of the monarchy and the imperial constitution. Incidentally Engels explained that the working class "can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic" (F Engels MECW Vol 27, London 1990, p228). True, the maximum programme of German social democracy "promised" socialism. But between the minimum and maximum programme there was, said Trotsky, no bridge. Indeed, as Trotsky explains, the right and centrist leaders had "no need for such a bridge", since the word "socialism" is only used for "holiday speechifying" (L Trotsky The transitional programme New York 1997, p114).

Trotsky warned his tiny band of scattered followers, organised under the umbrella of the so-called Fourth International, that it would be terrible mistake to "discard" the programme of old "minimal" demands "to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness" (ibid pp114-115). Nonetheless simply because capitalism was considered to be in absolute and terminal decline every serious economic demand of the workers "inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and the bourgeois state" (ibid p114). In effect Trotsky was reduced by extreme organisational weakness into advocacy of a particular version of economism: ie the workers would through strikes and other such elementary struggles find their "bridge" to revolutionary demands and revolutionary consciousness. With him eschatology was combined with revolutionary economism. This is what the much vaunted Transitional programme amounts to.

No matter how we excuse Trotsky in terms of how things appeared on the eve of World War II, there is no escaping that he was wrong in method and periodisation. Suffice to say, after World War II capitalism experienced its highest and longest boom. Cliff readily admits how "excruciatingly painful" it was to face up to the reality that Trotsky's prognosis had not come true (T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, p14). He was one of the few voices of sanity on the left. While 'official communism' derived solace from the Stalinite mantra that capitalism's general crisis was getting ever deeper, orthodox Trotskyism repeated Trotsky's 1938 formulations in order to inoculate itself. Ernest Mandel arrogantly denied the new-found dynamism of the system with the certainty of a Moses. Gerry Healy demanded obeisance to the crisis of leadership and imminent collapse of capitalism throughout his horrid life. In contrast Cliff fearlessly tried to come to terms with the world as it was. Arriving from Palestine in 1946, he was struck by the relatively high living standards of the working class and the existence of full employment in Britain. That had to be explained, not explained away.

Essentially Cliff held an underconsumptionist theory of capitalist crisis. Slumps, for him, have their origin in the inability of the masses to buy the goods which have been produced. Against that theory it has to be said that workers are employed because they produce surplus labour: ie, living labour produces beyond what is necessary for its own production and reproduction. So it is quite obvious that the profit system by its very nature must rest on a demand exterior to that of the working class. Surplus product can only be realised in the last analysis through sale to other capitalists. True, the more dead labour is accumulated in relation to living labour, the greater the amount of surplus product which has to be realised. Nevertheless under the lash of competition capitalists are engaged in an endless drive to expand production in order to realise profit - in the process new markets and new demands are created. Profit, not the consumption of the working class, therefore constitutes the limits of the system of capital (see S Clarke Marx's theory of crisis London 1994, pp144-47).

Underconsumptionism was with Cliff turned on its head. His explanation of the post-World War II boom lay in the theory of the permanent arms economy. The huge military budgets post-World War II served to temporarily stabilise the system by staving off overproduction through expanding a third department of production - arms - which relied solely on governmental demand; manufacturing the means of destruction served to boost aggregate demand and thereby through the multiplier effect increase investment in the production of the means of production and in turn the production of the means of consumption: ie, it stimulated both departments one and two.

Be that as it may, Cliff's verdict on Trotsky's Transitional programme was that it was disproved "by life" and that reformism was enjoying a second spring (T Cliff Neither Washington nor Moscow London 1982, p117). In conditions of rapidly rising real wages demands for a sliding scale of wages in line with the cost of living were at best "meaningless" or at worse "reactionary". The same went for a sliding scale of hours under conditions of full employment.

Unfortunately an incorrect Trotskyite reading of Bolshevik history plus a correct recognition that Trotsky's Transitional programme did not correspond to post-World War II conditions or needs produced in Cliff's mind a disdain for the revolutionary programme in general. SWP leaders, Cliff included, routinely boasted of their freedom from programmatic constraints. They might just as well boast of being at sea without a compass. In practice, for the SWP absence of programme meant hugging the familiar shores of everyday trade union politics and making abstract propaganda about the unknown continent of socialism. Unexpected lulls and violent storms could only but produce impressionistic bouts of pessimism and spasms of ultra-leftism. The SWP had no programme to guide it.

For example, in the midst of the miners' Great Strike of 1984-85 - a strategic clash of class against class - the SWP specialised in pessimism. The year-long strike with its hit squads, mass pickets, nationwide support groups, women against pit closure movement, etc, was declared Chris Harman an "extreme example" of what the SWP called the "downturn." Cliff had decreed that the whole period throughout the 1980s was one of retreat. Hence, as the miners gallantly battled with the Tory government and the semi-militarised police outside power stations and in the pit villages the SWP proclaimed that this was more like 1927 than 1925: ie, agitation to generalise the miners' strike by fusing it with the dockers, the railways, the Liverpool council and countless other such disputes - both possible and vital - was completely misplaced. We had already lost.

Such irresponsible defeatism, along with a deep seated anti-programmism, led comrade Cliff to write - only a few years ago - that Trotsky's Transitional programme was only relevant when there was "a situation of general crisis, of capitalism in deep slump", and that many of the programme's proposals - eg, workers' defence squads - "did not fit a non-revolutionary situation" (T Cliff Trotsky: The darker the night, the brighter the star London 1993, p300). As if the miners' hit squads of nine years before were not embryonic workers' defence squads in all but name.

Then all of a sudden everything began to change. In late 1992, when the NUM was forlornly looking towards Tory MPs and the shire county set to save Britain's remaining deep coal mining industry from Heseltine's savage decimation, the SWP stole the WRP's semi-anarchist slogan: ie, 'TUC, off your knees - call the general strike'. The general strike being only a prelude to social revolution which in the WRP's deranged schema had been days away since at least the early 1970s. That is why for serious Marxists, as opposed to charlatans and windbags, the call for a general strike is accompanied by agitation: ie, a dialogue with the masses, about the necessity of forming workers' defence squads. In 1992 of course the SWP did no such thing. Cliff did wildly suggest in an interview that if the SWP had 20,000 or 30,000 members the mass demonstration in London in support of the miners would have been re-routed and parliament stormed. Shades of Sergi Eisenstein and 'October' . or more likely the slaughter on the Odessa steps in 'Battleship Potemkin'.

The years that followed saw Cliff rationalise his flip from extreme pessimism by undertaking an intellectual return to Trotsky's 1938 version of programme (not Lenin's). Despite working class confidence and self-activity being at an all-time low ebb and revolutionary conciseness almost non-existent, Cliff decided that pursuit of even the most minimal demands is all that is needed to fell our mortal enemy.

Cliff insisted that we live not in a period of reaction (of a special type), but, one must presume, of imminent revolution. "Capitalism in the advanced countries," he wrote, "is no longer expanding and so the words of the 1938 Transitional programme that 'there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and raising the masses' living standards' fits reality again" (T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, pp81-2). As Cliff once said about the periodisation of Trotsky's epigones - pure fantasy. Suffice to say, capitalism in the advanced countries is still expanding - the USA recorded sustained high growth rates throughout the 1990s. The European Union too is an economic powerhouse. For those in work in Britain, especially in the private sector, living standards continue to climb in real terms. Worst paid labour is now benefiting from the minimum wage, albeit far below subsistence levels. Pathetically the 'Action programme' thunders that "at the very least" such workers need "£1 an hour more".

Even if economic struggles were all that it takes to transform the workers into a class for itself - which they are definitely not - capitalism in Britain still exhibits the potential to concede substantial reforms. As is universally known, the government possesses huge reserves counted in the tens of billions. The financial crisis which so excited Cliff in 1999 remained stubbornly confined to the far east and Russia. As to reforms, they are anyway primarily the by-product of class struggle, not capitalism's health. In the most difficult conditions, to save their system, the ruling class will enact the most far-reaching measures. As Luxemburg rightly noted, in 1905 the workers in backward Russia "were, as regards the economic and social freedom of their movement, head and shoulders above the Germans" (R Luxemburg The mass strike London nd, p56).

On May 1 1997 the SWP enthusiastically voted Labour. After two decades the slogan, 'Tories out', was realised. But not in the way the SWP hoped. Blair and his shadow cabinet, it should be stressed, had done everything to steer Labour to the right and lower popular expectations to the barest minimum. Those who turned out for Labour did so in the main because they thought it would be no worse than the Tories. Despite that, not least in order to excuse themselves, the SWP - along with the whole auto-Labourite left - did their utmost to talk things up. In the months following Blair's parliamentary landslide the SWP press carried daft articles on the theme that there existed a crisis of expectations. To state the obvious, there was no explosion.

Needless to say though, Cliff left the SWP he did so much to create and build facing a crisis of perspectives. Blair's de-Labourisation of Labour undermined auto-Labourism. At the same time the absence of any serious mass movement from below forced programmeless SWP theoreticians and propagandists to make the most absurd and hyperbolic claims to bolster Cliff's last about-turn. It thereby for a whole period came more and more to resemble the old WRP under the raving and ranting Gerry Healy.

Take Lindsey German - one of the top leaders of the SWP and an intelligent person by any reckoning. She insisted in early 1999 that Blairism was between the proverbial hammer and the anvil "in every major area of government policy". Therefore, comrade German held out the prospect of Britain being pushed to the brink of revolution through purely economic struggles: "It is increasingly obvious that even one major national strike or an all-out strike in one city would lead to a rapid crisis of Blairism and Labourism, as society polarised along class lines" (International Socialism No82, spring 1999, p35).

This was no objective assessment. It was servicing the Cliff line which had to be parroted, no matter what the evidence to the contrary. Hence in response to polls showing Blair enjoying historically unprecedented ratings, Mark Steel, then a Guardian columnist, felt duty-bound to turn reality onto its head: "Blair must be the most unpopular 'most popular person' ever," he lamely joked (The Guardian April 14 1999). The gulf separating SWP theory from reality stemmed directly from Cliff's 11th hour reconversion to Trotsky's Transitional programme.

4.2. The democratic imperative

Auto-Labourism was always a variety of economism (ie, the strikeist or trade union politics of the working class). Hence the left groups, sects and 'parties' - not least the SWP - neither grasp nor understand the necessity of prioritising democratic demands. That is why, faced with Blair's constitutional revolution from above, the old revolutionary left found itself tailing New Labour, unarmed and bemused.

Blair might not have been meticulously working towards some fully theorised 'third way' blueprint of changing the way we are ruled. Nevertheless he cannot be dismissed as simply a pragmatist and a philistine in the traditional British mould. Amitai Etzioni is Blair's inspiration. Perry Anderson his historian. Rupert Murdoch his publicist. Anthony Giddens his apostle. From the beginning all the portents and signs indicated a coherent and far-reaching resolve. Blair was not content with merely tinkering. He is remaking the constitution and, if he can, the popular sense of Britishness.

What does it mean? Certainly not the beginning of the end of Britain's supposedly incomplete bourgeois revolution. Blair's remaking of the UK constitution is in fact both the continuation and the complement of the Thatcherite counter-reformation. Blair has no intention whatsoever of resurrecting or re-creating the 1945-1979 social democratic settlement. His communitarianism is a reinvention of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism. The 'greatest good for the greatest number' is to be ensured by the market and the endless drive for profit.

There is, of course, a complex and dynamic interrelationship between reform from above and discontent below. What is particularly notable about Blair's programme of constitutional reform, however, is the absence of any working class input or alternative. Indeed it is the atomisation, the (temporary) disappearance of the working class from the political stage that creates the conditions whereby Blair can propose and carry through his programme. There is neither pressure nor threat from the working class. Nevertheless the main factor behind Blair's programme has been the fact that popular identification with the UK state has been gradually slipping away since at least the late 1960s. During the Thatcher years slippage became a slide.

In the name of capitalism, blessed by the certainty that "there is no alternative", the Iron Lady launched a neo-liberal offensive against the post-World War II social democratic settlement. Millions - in particular militant trade unionists and non-conformist youth, migrants and homosexuals, the unemployed and semi-employed, Scots and poll tax refuseniks - were thoroughly alienated. And not merely with the Tory government and the values of capitalism, but to a considerable extent the monarchical state itself. New identities were sought out and often found. That explains why Blair does not simply want to change the way we are ruled. Blair is determined to rewin popular identification with and acceptance of the state.

The UK is therefore being rebranded. In the name of democracy and in the absence of a democratic movement from below Blair wants to cement a new consensus. That is what his constitutional programme is designed to achieve. The political foundations and thus the political architecture of the UK is being transformed. The liberalisation of Labour, devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, reform of the House of Lords, a slim-line monarchy, European integration, PR elections are all component parts of an overarching constitutional revolution from above.

And yet the 'neither war nor peace' situation in Northern Ireland, Rhodri Morgan in Wales and Livingstone in London show that Blairism is far from invulnerable when it comes to democratic questions. In point of fact here we find the Achilles heal not only of Blairism but the system of capital itself. Let our allies in the London Socialist Alliance, not least the SWP, take note.

To achieve socialism requires revolution. Not just any revolution though. The revolution will have to be democratic, in the sense that it is an act of self-liberation by the majority and aims to take the democratic state to its limits as a semi-state that is already dying. Democracy and socialism should never be counterposed. The two are inexorably linked. Without socialism democracy is always formal and stops short of ending exploitation. Without democracy socialism is only post-capitalism; it is not proletarian socialism. The task of the working class is to champion democracy, not leave it to the bourgeoisie. Existing democratic forms must be utilised, new forms developed - eg, soviets or workers' councils - and given a definite social or class content. The purpose is to extend democracy and control from below both before and after the qualitative break represented by the proletarian revolution.

Interestingly, when confronted by the concrete reality of an emerging revolutionary situation in France, Trotsky had to move beyond his usually dismissive or sterile pronouncements on democracy under capitalism. He presented a programme for a "more generous" democracy which would facilitate the struggle of the workers. 'A programme of action for France' was published in June 1934 and contains the following splendid and, for the purposes of our discussion, very relevant passage:

"We are ... firm partisans of a workers' and peasants' state, which will take the power from the exploiters. To win the majority of our working class allies to this programme is our primary aim.

"Meanwhile, as long as the majority of the working class continues on the basis of bourgeois democracy, we are ready to defend it with all our forces against violent attacks from the Bonapartist and fascist bourgeoisie.

"However we demand from our class brothers who adhere to 'democratic' socialism that they are faithful to their ideas, that they draw inspiration from the ideas and methods not of the Third Republic, but the Convention of 1793.

"Down with the Senate, which is elected by limited suffrage and which renders the powers of universal suffrage a mere illusion!

"Down with the presidency of the republic, which serves as a hidden point of concentration for the forces of militarism and reaction!

"A single assembly must combine the legislative and executive powers."

Members would be elected for two years, by universal suffrage at 18 years of age, with no discrimination of sex or nationality. Deputies would be elected on the basis of local assemblies, constantly revocable by their constituents, and would receive the salary of a skilled worker.

"This is the only measure that would lead the masses forward instead of pushing them backward. A more generous democracy would facilitate the struggle for workers' power" (L Trotsky Writings of Leon Trotsky 1934-35 New York 1974, p31).

In contrast Cliff and the SWP downplay the struggle for democracy. Capitalism has more or less done it all. There is the ANL and racism, Nato and Kosova; but in the main the SWP wants to concentrate on bread and butter issues. That means low pay, trade union rights and recently it has involved standing in the Greater London Authority elections on a minimalist LSA platform. As the SWP comrades know, we communists do not ignore or dismiss such matters. However, in and of themselves such struggles and campaigns are confined within the framework of commodity production and the framework of the existing UK constitutional monarchy system. There is no bridge to socialism. That bridge cannot be a "sliding scale of wages" or "slashing the arms bill", etc, but is and can only be democracy. The working class must be trained through political struggle to become a universal class, a class that can master every contradiction, every grievance, every shortcoming and sees its interests as the liberation of the whole of humanity. For that, theory and a Marxist programme are vital.

Naturally, as good revolutionaries, comrades in the SWP indignantly rebuff the charge that their outlook is characterised by economism. They do after all state every week in Socialist Worker that the "present system cannot be reformed, as the established Labour and trade union leaders say", and that the working class can only achieve its objectives through a workers' state based on "councils of workers and a workers' militia" ('Where we stand'). But that is to reduce economism to strikism alone. There are, as we have indicated above, other forms of economism - in this instance it is revolutionary economism again (Lenin called it 'imperialist economism' in his day). As we have said, it entails downplaying the centrality of democracy for the working class. Thus the SWP totally ignores or wants to put off key democratic demands until after the revolution: eg, Scottish and Welsh self-determination, a single legislative chamber, annual parliaments, recallability of MPs, proportional representation, MPs' salaries limited to that of a skilled worker, abolition of the monarchy, a united Ireland with British-Irish self-determination in a one-county, four-half-counties province, etc. Democracy as an overriding question is absent before the revolution. Whatever the SWP's noble intentions, the working class thereby remains a class of slaves. That is the unintended upshot of revolutionary economism.

Faced with a national movement in Scotland, the SWP answers with economic struggles now and in the future. Wages, the NHS and trade union rights on the one hand, expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the other. The SWP cannot bring itself to actively side with the demand for a federal republic because it does not abolish class exploitation. They might just as well object to divorce or homosexual equality.

Every Marxist knows that democracy under capitalism is limited, partial and subverted. Yet democracy and the struggle to extend it brings to the fore the class contradiction between labour and capital. That is the crux of the matter. Far from being a diversion, immediate demands, such as Scottish and Welsh self-determination within a federal republic, are crucial. Without training the workers in the spirit of such a "more generous" democracy there can be no revolutionary working class unity, and the socialist revolution will thereby remain an empty abstraction.