12.06.2002
Dialectics of defeat
The Alliance for Workers' Liberty's conception of barbarism is designed to obfuscate, argues Martyn Hudson
If one of the foremost tasks of a revolutionary party is to act as the memory of the working class - recalling its traditions of resistance and defeat - then we must affirm the necessity of being true to that history. Through criticism, elaboration and theoretical development we must understand the nature of the social forces at work in world history in order to master them. Trotsky argued that we must face reality unflinchingly and speak the truth to the proletariat in times of defeat and of victory. To abdicate the search to understand the profound defeats of the last century and the nature of the present period is to cease being a revolutionary. Emerging from the wreckage of the 20th century, groups like the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and the Communist Party of Great Britain have attempted to sustain the scattered 'political civilisation' of unfalsified Marxism. They have tried to rescue Marxism from what the AWL's Sean Matgamna has called the "political barbarism" of the Stalinist "dark age", whilst at the same time relentlessly criticising those Trotskyists, like James Cannon and Michel Pablo, who refused to surrender the doctrinal orthodoxy self-imposed at Trotsky's death - Trotskyists who, in their inability to understand the real social forces at work through Stalinist 'bureaucratic collectivism' and capitalism, became complicit in the 'barbarism' of Stalinism, particularly in regard to the idea of a degenerated workers' state and the ultimately transitional and progressive nature of Soviet imperialism. This article is written in a spirit of elaboration and criticism in order to clarify some of the difficulties in the AWL's understanding of the 20th century and the present period. This criticism rests particularly on that very understanding of "political barbarism", which is so central to both their historical work and their political practice today. In an article titled 'The communist manifesto after Stalinism' Sean Matgamna began to develop a new conception of the barbarism of the past and present period (Workers' Liberty January 1988, pp37-44). He argues in this essay that the disillusions of social democracy and Stalinism has led communists to a reassessment of the nature of the Marxist project. The hopeful vision of a future society has been replaced by endless despairing dystopias of an 'age of disillusionment'. Yet, in the aftermath of the profound defeats of the 20th century, Marxism does not then abandon the struggle. Marxism was originally distinguished from naive ideas of liberal progress by a 'darker' vision, where not only revolutionary reconstitutions, but common ruins of the contending classes were also possible. Marxists, argues Matgamna, "saw social reality not as inevitably progressing, but as a continuous struggle between the forces of socialism and those of barbarism" (p39). Yet part and parcel of that very barbarism was the experience of the historical defeat of the Russian Revolution, culminating in autocracy and the falsification of authentic revolutionary politics. In order to sustain that political project we need to understand the defeat that the proletariat suffered at the hands of Stalinist 'bureaucratic collectivist' counterrevolution. Matgamna's ideas on the nature of defeat in the 20th century are largely unproblematic but there are serious difficulties with his and the AWL's extension of the concept of barbarism to include almost anything. Critical to the degeneration of the terminological concept is Matgamna's important editorial for the newly recomposed Worker's Liberty (September 2001) entitled 'In an age of barbarism'. The editorial tries to formulate two basic ideas. Firstly, that we live in an age of neo-barbarism. Secondly, that we must distinguish the search for an independent working class politics from both social democracy and Stalinism. These statements are in essence a crystallisation of the political programme of the AWL in miniature. This is why we must address the issues they raise with a sense of urgency. Barbarism Before we explore the substance of Matgamna's construction of the concept of neo-barbarism it is worth briefly thinking about the concept of 'originary' barbarism, as it appears in the work of Engels and the anthropological work of LH Morgan. This is important because this archaic notion of barbarism is the template for the AWL's idea of the barbarism of the present period. One essential point that Matgamna evades in his account of neo-barbarism is the fact that the idea is founded on quite spurious anthropological evidence that has been called into question for over a century. Of course the classic accounts of the nature of barbarism and its relationship to an ensuing civilisation are in Engels's The origin of the family, private property and the state (London 1940, pp21-25 and pp179-204) and the book on which the Marxist account is based - LH Morgan's Ancient society (1877). Although Morgan's account of the historical process is quite fascinating and an interesting corrective to historical pessimism, its very focus on the ultimately and unproblematically progressive nature of the historical process is superseded by an anti-mechanical Marxism. It also sits very uneasily with Matgamna's idea of historical defeat and detour. The fact that Engels based his own analysis on Morgan's conception of the historical process makes it doubly concerning that this is not mentioned in such an important editorial from the AWL. More recent Marxist accounts, such as the general one by Maurice Bloch, have relegated the older versions to little more than historical curiosities. Nothing could be further from the spirit of Marx and Engels than accepting these works as fixed and static texts rather than considering them as interesting forms of Marxist theory, but empirically no longer sustainable. What is interesting about Morgan's theory of barbarism is that it is situated within a generalised theory of historical progress. This progress is the fundamental law of movement and progress will always prevail against regress and reaction. Morgan asserts, on the basis of his flawed and soon to be superseded evidence available to him, that savagery preceded barbarism in all the tribes of humanity, as barbarism has preceded civilisation - "The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, and in progress" (LH Morgan Ancient society New York 1877, p6). Characterised amongst other things by the pairing family, the decline of the gens's social structure, private family property, women's oppression and embryonic state forms, barbarism was part and parcel of the history of a 'universal' human progress which is empirically of little foundation. The social forces invested in new forms of property was to lead to the development of a civilisation which itself contains the slave, feudal and capitalist social formations. As we shall see, within this civilisation there has been one serious reversion for Matgamna - the bureaucratic collectivist counterrevolution, which he claims was a form of barbarism - very clearly a regress to that dead form way back beyond not only capitalism, but feudalism and slavery. Ultimately this would be a social formation where presumably even the idea of property would be absent. All of this is far from the progressive vision of an 'Engels-Morganist' conception of a progressive historical barbarism. LH Morgan's idea of the progressive potential of humanity had led him to assert that in the face of the "unmanageable power" of property as it existed in civilisation, the formation emerging from barbarism, "The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation", but the human mind will win. Yet we find ourselves not even asserting the revival of or reversion to classical civilisation, but of the barbarism which, according to Morgan and Engels, preceded it. Now, no social form emerges fully complete: each nascent form is embryonic within the older formation sometimes for hundreds of years. This is Aufheben, which both Hegel and Marx noted as a fundamental aspect of the dialectical historical process. I have noted the importance of this concept elsewhere ('On the dead of world history' Race and Class vol 43, No4, 2002, pp26-33), but central to it is the idea, at once, of cancellation, elevation and preservation of the older social form within the new - that which is superseded is also elevated into the new social form. Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, has recently noted the dialectic elevation of classes, cultures and forms of production into the new formation. At the same time the simple idea of absolute reversion outside of the complete and final ruin of the contending classes is not a historical possibility. The historical struggles between a nascent bourgeoisie and a feudal or absolutist reaction, as happens in the peasant war in Germany or in the European-wide Thirty Years War which culminated in profound historical defeats for all sides, had their progressive elements in hindsight. So the age of neo-barbarism is to be seen as the complete resurrection of the archaic form, a conjuring up of the dead social formations of history, a "world-historical necromancy", to use the words of Marx, not of individuals but of an entire formation. This is a parody of the process of historical development and retardation. Epoch of defeat Our century was undoubtedly an epoch of generalised defeat for the working class. The significance of the destruction of the Russian Revolution has not been overly stressed. Yet to describe the period as a period of barbarism, as Matgamna does, is to do violence to basic Marxist concepts and its idea of history. Our period is that period of revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism with all of the defeats, detours and developments that this process entails - the Marxist conception of a future barbarism entails the notion of a complete civilisational collapse or reversion: the result of the mutual destruction of contending classes and dying and emerging social formations. We are in that moment in which the old is passing and the new is being brought to birth. Gramsci describes our period in the following manner: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear" (A Gramsci Selections from the prison notebooks London 1971, p276). The interregnum of the revolutionary transition is quite correctly to be described as a transitional epoch. As we shall see, Matgamna also describes this as an "imperialist barbarism" - barbarism seen here not as a simple reversion, but as a formation in which there is a gap - the gap between when we are ready for communism technologically and culturally (some point during the last hundred years) and when we actually get there (some point in the future). This gap or period of transition is due to the dual effects of a reformist social democracy on the one side and a profoundly reactionary Soviet imperialism on the other. This is correct, but it has little to do with the first idea of barbarism that Matgamna postulates. This central problematic of our period - those things which block the route to the future society - is not resolved by arguing that barbarism has already been achieved. There is a profound crisis of ideology in our period in terms of Labourism and Soviet despotism, but the interregnum has not ended with the construction of a formation of neo-barbarism. Another writer who has argued in a different way for an understanding of a present period of barbarism is Eric Hobsbawm, whom Sean Matgamna and the AWL seem to be tailing in their misunderstanding of a barbaric social formation. In one of his recent talks and essays Hobsbawm has constructed a notion of barbarism at odds in some ways with classical Marxist accounts of the phenomenon. His thesis is that, "After about 150 years of secular decline, barbarism has been on the increase for most of the 20th century, and there is no sign that this increase is at an end" ('Barbarism: a user's guide' On History London 1997, pp253-254). In other words a nascent capitalist civilisation with all of its horrors was not a form of barbarism, but the 20th century was. Superficially this sounds like an argument for the gap as Matgamna would have it. But Hobsbawm points to something which rests much more upon bourgeois ideology than upon the dialectics of the revolutionary proletariat (as one would undoubtedly expect). Barbarism for Hobsbawm means two things. First, the disruption and collapse of the systems of rules, morals and ethical standards by which all societies regulate the relations among members and between their members and those of other societies (and when was this ever a presence in an embryonic capitalism?). Secondly, Hobsbawm sees our contemporary barbarism as the historic reversal of the enlightenment project to establish a universal system of rules and standards of moral behaviour, embodied very clearly in the bourgeois revolutions in the United States and France. This leads Hobsbawm to argue for the barbaric nature of the 20th century as less a social formation than in the next period a reversion to feudalism. The original stage of historic barbarism is completely ignored and, whilst Matgamna reaffirms the template of the original historic barbarism, his analysis and periodisation is close to Hobsbawm, particularly in seeing the accelerated descent into darkness of the 20th century as an eclipse of the ideas of the enlightenment. But for Matgamna to state, in a way that Hobsbawm does not, that the reversion is so profound as to revert completely beyond the civilisational stages of slavery, feudalism and capitalism is an abdication of a truly historical materialism. What is similar, as we shall see, in both Hobsbawm's and Matgamna's accounts is the distinction between a systematically enforced barbarism, as presented in Soviet 'bureaucratic collectivism', and a new barbarous flux which emerges in the collapse of that project in the late 1980s and 1990s. This period of breakdown and disruption is a consequence of the failure of social democracy and liberal capitalism and what Matgamna obviously mentions and Hobsbawm does not: the profound defeat of the Russian Revolution. But Hobsbawm makes a crucial point which Matgamna completely evades - the key to this barbaric period rather than a social formation of barbarism is that it is "not a return to ancient savageries", but the result of a double collapse of states and global social relations (ibid p264). In other words a period of insecurity and danger issuing from that very collapse of the regimes of 'official communism'. We must reassess this period of defeat without issuing edicts that barbarism is already victorious. Socialism and barbarism In a recent book Toni Negri and Michael Hardt have elucidated the nature of the period resulting from the collapse of the regimes of bureaucratic socialism. This essentially non-Marxist analysis purports to display the shift from the reality of imperialisms to empire. There is little to concern us here except the ways in which barbarism is explored in this work (and incidentally passed over without criticism by Colin Foster in Workers' Liberty vol 2, No2, recently). Negri posits a similar analysis of neo-barbarism to that of Matgamna, but one which explicitly challenges the 'barbaric imperialism' idea at the heart of the AWL analysis. Negri argues for the progressive nature of barbarism in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, where the formation of a migrant, barbarian horde is a positive desertion from socialist discipline - the desertion of "productive cadres" disorganised and struck at the heart of the disciplinary system of the bureaucratic Soviet world. In other words a new barbarianism was central in disordering the older barbarism of Soviet imperialism (A Negri, M Hardt Empire Boston 2000, p214). Quoting Walter Benjamin out of context, Negri argues for new barbaric 'deployments' and a new affirmative violence to wipe the slate of history clean. This is the basis for the formation of a new social system and a new "mode of life" (ibid pp215-216). This vision is, of course, deeply problematic and quite reactionary, but it expresses what is at the heart of Matgamna's vision of neo-barbarism - dislocation, confusion and in the case of the AWL an incapacity for truly recognising the nature of the present period. Classical Marxist accounts of contemporary rather than archaic barbarism, from which Matgamna and the AWL explicitly draw their distorted conceptions, are of course quite clear about the nature of political barbarism - the why, how, when and what of barbarism, so to speak. The crucial debate, as we know, in the formation of the AWL and the tradition from which it emerges is that between Trotsky and the Shachtmanites in the United States. But the AWL also situates itself explicitly within Luxemburg's tradition of understanding barbarism. Before we address the substance of the AWL's terminological shibboleth we will look briefly at some aspects of the respective analyses. Matgamna and the AWL have been quite right in their assertion that Trotsky, in his debates with Shachtman and his comrades, was contradictory and unwittingly gave comfort to a progressive vision of Stalinism. Yet his analysis of barbarism should be examined again by Matgamna. Trotsky argues that ultimately the decisive advantage that the proletariat has over the bourgeoisie is that it represents historical progress, whilst the bourgeoisie "incarnates reaction and decline" (L Trotsky In defence of Marxism London 1975, p37). Trotsky asks what kind of society will emerge if the forces of reaction - ie, the bourgeoisie - conquer. But the forces of reaction do not simply conquer for the bourgeoisie and for liberal-democratic culture - they ultimately culminate in the victory of "totalitarian servitude", because that bourgeois civilisation will enter a crisis from which it cannot seemingly recover. This is the distinction then between a bourgeois order in crisis and the final, future victory of barbarism (if socialism cannot halt that civilisational collapse). What Matgamna does is conflate this present economic and ideological crisis of the bourgeoisie with the final reversion to barbarism. This mistaken conflation lies at the heart of the notion of neo-barbarism. The ultimate reversion to barbarism is the elimination of any hope of socialism, whilst in reality the present period remains a possible transitionary period to communism, where, as Trotsky says, the complicated, heterogeneous and contradictory socialist project is embryonic and where the struggle is capable of resolution in our favour. Neo-barbarism is the surrender of that hope. But what would a barbaric reversion look like to Trotsky? The march of events has succeeded in demonstrating that the delay of the socialist revolution engenders the indubitable phenomenon of barbarism - chronic unemployment, pauperisation of the petty bourgeoisie, fascism, finally wars of extermination which do not open up any new road. What social and political forms can the new 'barbarism' take, if we admit theoretically that humanity should not be able to elevate itself to socialism (ibid p38)? This neo-barbarism (Trotsky uses the phrase) is profoundly different from Matgamna's. It is the victory of "totalitarian servitude", not a transitional period in which communism is still a viable result. If Matgamna really accepts that neo-barbarism has triumphed, then we have not just accumulated defeats, but have suffered, according to Trotsky, the final defeat, at the hands of a history where any idea of progress has been abandoned. Rosa Luxemburg, in a similar manner to Trotsky, had argued that the great dilemma of world history was the alternative of socialism or barbarism. Barbarism, for Luxemburg, clearly meant total civilisational collapse and complete reversion beyond civilised history to archaic barbarism, even savagery. Only the conscious political intervention of the proletariat can resolve the contradiction through revolutionary struggle - barbarism is avoidable. At the same time we can see the barbaric embryo in our society - it is not a fully formed barbarism, but the inklings of chaos, as Norman Geras has noted of a nascent barbarism: "That same chaotic condition is also the end point of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism if the proletarian revolution does not intercede to prevent its being reached. At the same time, even before it is reached, the forms taken by the process of collapse are sufficiently disruptive and destructive to count, for Luxemburg, as incipient forms of barbarism" (N Geras The legacy of Rosa Luxemburg London 1976, p32). That incipient form of barbarism is not to be conflated with a victory of barbarism - socialism is still possible with the active intervention of the historical forces of the proletariat. Demagogic In the same way that Sean Matgamna deplores the demagogic catch-cries of the Stalinist debasement of the Marxist vocabulary, so we too should reject this method when used by our comrades in the AWL. Matgamna derides the fact of the sectarian degeneration of Trotsky (The fate of the Russian Revolution London 1997, p88). He argues that in the debates with Shachtman Trotsky is teaching his followers that terminological convenience and the implications of concepts are legitimate factors in our theoretical calculations. "Impermissibly" distorting terms, Matgamna is using the method of palimpsestry he so deplores in Trotsky - writing new meanings into old texts and concepts. The idea of neo-barbarism is a concept of convenience used by Matgamna in our struggle of ideas in order to foster an idea of apocalyptic catastrophism in independent working class politics. What Matgamna forgets is that speaking the truth to the masses is of the first order, not seeking the line of least resistance in creating shibboleths like this. Whatever the problems with the idea of bureaucratic collectivism, the AWL has consistently tried to uncover the truth of our history and movement. It has abdicated that responsibility here. There is a distortion of older terminologies in order to dismiss real historical problems, which, to quote Matgamna, "only destructures meaning and erodes and corrupts words" (ibid p96). As we have seen above, the original Marxist conception of barbarism argued for a vision of history which could result not only in a third campist working class victory, but in definitive historical collapse underneath the weight of a series of accumulated and decisive defeats. Barbarism was a kind of third historical solution compared to capitalism and communism - a solution imposed by the "ruin of the contending classes", in Marx's words. But this concept becomes distorted in the discourse of Matgamna and the AWL to mean an understanding of an already achieved reversion - as something already a resultant from Stalinism, a sustained interregnum, or the nature of contemporary capitalism. This distortion needs to be clarified because the practical, political consequences of this idea could mean an embracing of anything which is seen to counter barbarism - older ideas of social and liberal democracy perhaps or a rejection, in panic, of the patient building of a united revolutionary organisation and so on. To begin with, Matgamna outlines the classical account of barbarism in the theories of Engels and Morgan without, as we have seen, the recognition of the immense problem of accepting their analysis of an archaic savagery-barbarism-civilisation triptych. He then uses this classical account in order to illustrate the nature of contemporary neo-barbarism. Archaic barbarism was characterised by progressive human control over nature, the emergence of proto-scientific knowledge and the growth of human potential ('In an age of barbarism' Workers' Liberty vol 2, No1, 2001, p1). In contrast to this, neo-barbarism is not unavoidable and not progressive. The key to this for Matgamna is to examine the way in which the old formation dies and the new is born. Neo-barbarism is precisely that period in which capitalism has created the preconditions for communism. A stage (lasting for two centuries) where an embryonic, dynamic capitalism has conquered nature but cannot break through to the new stage of human development. So neo-barbarism here is analogous to the last two centuries of capitalism, where the old form is prolonged at the cost of profound environmental ruination, yet nowhere does Matgamna make clear the nature of capitalism. At what point do social relations come into conflict with productive relations? At what point do we move into the period of the gap or interregnum and hence in these terms into neo-barbarism? If neo-barbarism is defined by the gap, as Matgamna makes explicit, where does this happen? The shifting concept of convenience becomes conflated with the barbaric effects of the rule of capital, but nowhere does it become clear that this is an age of barbarism, as Marxists have understood the idea. Matgamna notes Marx's idea that no system gives way to its successor until all the potentialities present within it are exhausted. Has this exhaustion happened? There is no solution here to the perpetual mystery of political economy. If we are to take Matgamna's statement at face value, then the last two centuries - full stop - are a neo-barbaric age which "progressively destroys the natural preconditions of production and is destroying the social conditions of its own social existence" (ibid p2). This is without any distinction on the periodisation of capitalist development over two centuries or the ultimately progressive nature of capitalism. Instead it is an untenable hybrid of civilisation and the "darkest barbarism", yet at the same time Matgamna argues that this barbaric project is actually the opposite of archaic barbarism rather than its part reversion. Instead of being determined by nature as in archaic barbarism, neo-barbarism leaves nature at our mercy - so in what sense can we construct an affinity between these two dark ages? Instead of stressing the progressive nature of archaic barbarism and the present transitional period, the barbarism of the gap elucidates a concept of history which is clearly problematic. This is displayed in Matgamna's misleading notion of the stages of historical development: "As barbarism led to civilisation, feudalism led to the higher stage, capitalism" (ibid p3). This of course constructs a false analogy. In the accounts of Engels and Morgan, as we have seen, savagery gives birth to barbarism, which in turn gives birth to civilisation. Within civilisation we have ancient slavery, feudalism and capitalism. For this project of civilisation to collapse we would have to talk about a profound and unparalleled historical reversion - past feudalism and slavery back to archaic barbarism. What Matgamna is describing in the present period is not a reversion of this kind at all, but part of the more generalised yet not decisive defeats of the last century. In the same way as Matgamna describes the bourgeoisie taking centuries to make itself the ruling class - through many phases, false starts, defeats and so on, so the proletariat has developed through the last two centuries. Our defeats of the last century at the hands of social democracy and Stalinism have led to a neo-barbarism "superimposed by an outmoded bourgeois ruling class on an economically dynamic society" (ibid p4). The 'barbarism' of an asphyxiated, bureaucratic Stalinism (profoundly different, it would seem, from that of a post-Stalinist neo-barbarism) and a social-democratic reformism which would use the methods of barbarism of occasion are then situated within an expanding, dynamic capitalism - refuting the thesis of a neo-barbaric solution to a dying capital. Our terminological convenience is the catch-cry of those unable to achieve clarification on the nature of the 'bureaucratic collectivism' of the past and of capitalism today. It is clearly unacceptable not only as an empirical description of our period of transition, but is also a theoretically bankrupt device to obfuscate - it displays an inability to clarify the nature and the tasks of the epoch. If Marxism is to be "the consciousness of the unconscious processes of society" and a method of uncovering the deep molecular processes of historical development, then it must rigorously and unflinchingly search for the truth of history and not construct conceptual abstractions which serve to mystify the historical project of the proletariat. The map of the route to the future lies, as Sean Matgamna rightly points out, in Lenin's insistence on openness, polemic and drawing lines of demarcation between correct and incorrect formulations and tendencies. The struggle to forge a united Communist Party is a struggle against ill-thought out and reactionary formulations.
Worker