21.09.2005
Labour and revolutionary strategy
The role of revolutionaries is to understand and connect with the living mass movement, argues Graham Bash in this edited version of his speech to this year's Communist University. But what do we do when that movement is at a low ebb?
The question of what the British revolution will look like has not been top of my list of pressing questions to answer for the last 25 years or so. However contradictory this period has been in Britain and internationally, it has essentially been one of setback, defeat and downturn for the movements of the working class and the oppressed: the untrammelled power and hegemony of the United States empire, and its wars with British support on the rest of the world; the destruction of the Soviet Union; the tragedies in the Middle East and Africa; and the rise of ethnic division, ethnic cleansing and religious fundamentalism; and, in Britain, the working class marginalised, its political representation all but destroyed, with the Labour Party taken over by Thatcherites; a massive political vacuum and crisis of representation; and growing moves towards centralised state power and the destruction of civil liberties. Now, of course, in this period there have been countervailing forces as well: revolutionary developments in various countries of the world, including Venezuela and other parts of Latin America; and the enormous, spontaneous anti-war movement in this country and internationally in the anti-capitalist movement, none of which we should ignore or downplay. But, overall, the picture for the last generation has been one of retreat, defeat and a struggle for survival. So there are no grounds for feckless optimism. And yet, if revolutionaries are to continue to struggle in these conditions, we must equally avoid the opposite error of cynicism, demoralisation and loss of hope, which are unforgivable in a revolutionary. It is necessary to reassess what is the role of revolutionaries in a period such as this - how we fight back, how we interact with the rest of the revolutionary movement and the broader movement of the working class and oppressed, and how we begin to reassemble the forces for revolutionary change. For one thing is certain: if revolution is now less certain and probable than many of us thought a generation ago (and a generation ago I thought it was pretty certain), never has it been more necessary. It may be helpful for me to codify, point by point, my position on what revolution is and what revolutionaries should do. (1) No revolutionary organisation can be built, or revolutionary unity which is of any use achieved, unless those involved in building that revolutionary group are at the same time engaged in the struggle for the broadest unity and strength of the broader labour movement. (2) As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist manifesto over 150 years ago, communists have no interests separate and apart from those of the working class. Any organisation that puts its own interests above and separate from those of the broader movement can only build a sect. (3) A revolutionary group or party, on the one hand, and the united front, on the other, are not alternatives, but part of the same process. You cannot build a revolutionary group organically linked to and part of the working class movement outside the struggle for a united front. Remember Trotsky's definition of soviets as the highest form of a united front in his writings on Germany. (4) We have been bequeathed the concept of the Leninist revolutionary party that is distorted - Stalinised - by those such as Zinoviev, who provide a picture of a revolutionary group appearing almost ready-made with a perfect programme, setting up its banner, fighting off the reformists and centrists, and when the moment comes in 1917 the masses flock behind its banner. It is absolute crap, of course: it did not happen like that at all. Yet this version of history has found its way into the revolutionary movement, including the Trotskyist movement, justifying the most grotesque bureaucratic centralism of sectarian groups - at its worst Gerry Healy's group - and the concept of the struggle for a revolutionary programme, hermetically sealed from the experience of the working class. And I think the Weekly Worker falls into this error. (5) A revolutionary programme, revolutionary consciousness, is ultimately a consciousness of the actual and potential strength of the international working class movement, an attempt to give a conscious expression to the underlying material realities. Anything else - supra-historical principles, abstractions - become religious mantras little better than three Hail Marys and a Glory Be. (6) In considering what a revolution looks like, and what a revolutionary party looks like, we are not starting from scratch. We do have the benefit of historical experience. That historical experience is not a replacement for concrete analysis, but it is a guide, a starting point. And my starting point is the statement of Marx and Engels that we communists have no interests separate from those of the working class. My starting point is the historical experience of the Russian Revolution. And I again repeat: a starting point, not an end point. Bolsheviks I believe the Bolshevik Party is a model. Not the Bolsheviks of pre-1917, who were sometimes divorced from the labour movement and sometimes sectarian, nor the Bolsheviks of post-1917 when bureaucratic degeneration was beginning. My model is the Bolshevik Party of 1917, which operated in conditions infinitely more favourable than those we can dream of in this country, facing as they did an impotent bourgeoisie, and therefore a weak reformist current in the workers' movement. Yet even in these conditions, these revolutionaries succeeded in taking power, because they understood the centrality of the united front. Their slogan was not 'Power to the Bolsheviks'. It was 'All power to the soviets', which were the united front bodies of the working class. The highest form, as Trotsky explained, as opposed to the lowest form, which is probably the British Labour Party. Marcel Liebman, in his incredibly brilliant book, Leninism under Lenin, described the Bolshevik Party of that time. He wrote: "In the course of 1917 in Russia, the masses and the party came together. The proletariat identified itself with an organisation that had become for the first time its own organisation. The terms of the relation between class and party, between guided class and guiding party, the class that is led and the party that leads, were reversed - the Bolshevik party having at last agreed to submit itself to the revolutionary proletariat." What Liebman calls libertarian Leninism was made possible because the party ceased to be in relation to the masses an external body, an organ imposing itself as leader. Now, the point is that this is not just an academic discussion. To the extent that we are part of a revolutionary organisation and not a sect, the struggle for the united front and the unity of the working class is what we always do, not at the cost of programmatic clarity or as an alternative to it, but side by side with it. Now my approach to revolutionary politics in some ways is not a comfortable one, and nor should it be. It is to begin in our practice now to try to unify what are in today's non-revolutionary conditions opposites. Or rather, to break down the divisions between what appear to be opposites. I mean the divisions between theory and practice, between the revolutionary left and the working class. The divisions between politics and life itself - for the revolution is not something that happens in the outside world: we are part of that revolution, and it is part of us, affecting the way that we as human beings relate to the rest of the world. Comrades, please do not accuse me of trying to set up communes or islands of socialism in the capitalist world. On the contrary, all these divisions can only be overcome as revolutionary conditions unfold. And all our attempts in this period can only be partial. But our practice must attempt to prefigure as best as we can the revolution that we are trying to give expression to. I have referred to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky as our starting points and guides to action. I do not apologise for that: I am a Trotskyist (and I do not deny it is uncomfortable being a Trotskyist in the Labour Party). But at the same time there are a number of negative historical experiences, when a failure to understand what a revolution is, and what a revolutionary party must do, can have disastrous consequences. Now the obvious example is the role of the old Bolsheviks in 1917. Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin repeated by rote Lenin's old, inadequate formulation of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', misunderstood the underlying revolutionary realities and opposed the road to revolution. A perfect example with the old Bolsheviks of treating the programme as a set of abstractions, religious mantras to be repeated outside of any concrete analysis of the living conditions. Portugal But the most glaring example in my lifetime was the Portuguese revolution in 1974-75. The greatest crime for any revolutionary is not to make a mistake - I have made very many. The greatest crime for a revolutionary is actually to end up on the wrong side of the barricades. And that is exactly what a section of the Trotskyist movement did in the Portuguese revolution. The Healy and Lambert groups, and the group around the American Socialist Workers Party. Portugual was the closest western Europe has come to revolution in my lifetime - certainly closer than France in 1968 and certainly the closest since immediately after World War II. It did not follow the usual pattern. In many ways it was a partial, distorted, bureaucratised revolution, led by sections of the disaffected armed forces within a state apparatus that had split along class lines. Thus led to a form of dual power - not in the classic sense of the bourgeois state and the soviets, but the bourgeois state itself splitting, so that sections of it were actually representing the power of the working class. The Stalinist Communist Party, however much it held back the revolutionary forces, was on the workers' side of that divide; and the Socialist Party, a creation of western European capitalism, was on the bourgeois side. Our revolutionaries, disdaining to see a revolution when it stared them in the face, saw a struggle between the armed forces and the bourgeois state on one side, and the Socialist Party, a workers' party, on the other. And they ended up supporting counterrevolution. I am not a bitter person, but I remember feeling a depth of bitterness and shame that a section of our movement, and actually some sections of the group of which I was a member, could actually end up supporting counterrevolution. Those on the Labour left who did not have these lunatic mantras to follow saw this was a revolution. The Times and The Daily Telegraph thought this was a revolution. But our Trotskyists could see nothing of the kind. This was not just an error - it was a crime. The end of the Portuguese revolution, in November 1975, represented the end of my revolutionary youth. But I will never forget those endless, exhausting demonstrations of revolutionary workers in Lisbon, led by Copcon, the armed forces movement. I remember going through the streets - these demonstrations took hours and it was terribly hot in August - and passing narrow alleys, seeing old women in black shouting their support. It was a revolution that went deep - it went almost so deep that you might have thought some revolutionaries would actually recognise it was happening. But they did not. This is what happens when you impose abstract, ahistorical schema on concrete revolutionary conditions. For the record, by the way, Cliff, Grant and Mandel may not have understood properly the development of the Portuguese revolution, but, to give them credit, they had the instinct and class loyalty to stand on the right side of the barricades. They did not necessarily recognise why, but they were on the right side. Venezuela A third example, which is a current one, is the unfolding revolutionary situation in Venezuela, where the revolutionary left, myself included, have been slow to come alive to the potential for revolutionary developments there. I am going to do something I have never done before: going to quote extensively from Alan Woods of Socialist Appeal. I have no illusions in this group - they are sectarians, they are idealists, and I grew up as a revolutionary Trotskyist in opposition to what I perceived to be their centrism, which is not something I am now changing my mind about. But all credit to them for their work on Venezuela. As I read Alan Woods' Venezuela book, some phrases hit me that I think can inform our discussion about what a revolution is and about what revolutionaries should be doing. He starts off by quoting from Lenin: "Whoever expects to see a pure social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is." Woods says there are "Marxists of all kinds - some have read a lot, some not so much, some have taken the trouble to penetrate the essence of the Marxist method to make a careful study of dialectics, while others have merely skated over the surface. Reading the writings of such Marxism, one always has the impression of entering into the dark basement of a public library that has remained closed for many years. Full of undigested knowledge - airless, dusty, sterile: this is Marxism stripped of dialectics, stripped of its revolutionary soul. This kind of Marxism is quite compatible with reformism and passivity, because it never leaves the armchair and slippers. "A revolutionary must have an understanding of the dialectical method, that takes its starting point not from abstract definitions and axioms, but from the living reality, in all its concreteness, richness, and contradictions. He or she must take the movement of the masses as it is, as it has historically developed, and strive by all means to enter into contact with it, establish a dialogue with it, and 'fertilise it with the ideas of Marxism'" - that is where you see the idealism. But he continues: "Formalistic thinkers do not bother their heads with a careful study of facts and processes, they do not have to work hard to discover the laws of motion of a given revolution, because they know, or imagine they know, the laws of revolution in general. Thus armed they do not need to waste time studying the facts, they merely apply their preconceived ideas and definitions to the facts. Armed with such potent knowledge the formalist can decide in advance whether to recognise the events in Venezuela, or any other country, as a revolution or not. From the Olympian heights they refuse to give the Venezuelan revolution a birth certificate. Fortunately the revolution does not know about this excommunication, and cares even less about it." "In ordinary times, the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made up by specialists in that line of business. But at these crucial moments, when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break open the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime. This, I think, is a very important statement from Alan Woods. It talks about understanding the objective laws of any concrete revolution. And not only recognising the objective forces, but intervening in them, so that we become part of objective reality. Now that is the statement to me of what revolutionary politics is. The spirit of revolution must enter us, become part of us, and dictate our practice. Labour Party Which brings me really to my last and most fundamental point. Revolution is about a transfer of power and the struggle for revolution is a struggle for power. This raises the core issue of how we can struggle for power in conditions of a bureaucratised trade union movement in retreat, and a Labour Party that has been reduced to a shell of a labour movement organisation. Now I have just come across a document I wrote 28 years ago. I got this out and thought, 'Good, I can use this as a stick to beat the Weekly Worker with.' But actually it is a stick to beat me with, because there are problems with it. At that time, in 1978, there was a living Labour Party for all its faults. And now we have just the shell, the skeleton, of a Labour Party. So, if this analysis is now wrong, what do we do about it? I do not actually know the answers. I wrote: "We clearly do not have the perspective of turning the Labour Party into a revolutionary party. The working class revolution in Britain can be won only under the leadership of a revolutionary, Bolshevik-type party. That party will not be built independently of the struggle inside the Labour Party, by gradually accumulating its numbers until it rivals the Labour Party." That is clearly the case still. However, I continued: "This is impossible, given the traditions and development of the British labour movement. The centrepiece of the building of the revolutionary party is the struggle within the rank and file bodies of the Labour Party and trade unions, as embryonic and potential forms of proletarian state power. To win as many of these bodies as possible behind the vanguard leadership as bulwarks of the revolution." It was tough to say that in 1978, but it is impossible to say it now. My conclusion was: "The task of the revolutionary party is to struggle so far as possible so that this can be done in the name of, and on behalf of, those existing organisations. Now, we reject a perspective of split in both senses of the phrase. While we are not crystal ball gazers, we nonetheless regard it as most unlikely that the Labour Party will be split or destroyed, short of an all-out revolutionary situation. We take this view because we recognise the Labour Party as the political expression of the trade union movement. The right wing may split off, as they did in 1931. But this would leave the Labour Party's trade union base intact. Even a left split, such as that of the Independent Labour Party in the 1930s, would have scant effect unless the major unions disaffiliated from the Labour Party." And we can see what has happened in the last few years. The Socialist Labour Party under Scargill, then the Socialist Alliance, split and nobody noticed. So: "There may be splits from the Labour Party - probably from the right, possibly from the left - but there can be no fundamental split within the Labour Party and the trade unions until the trade unions themselves break away, and this is unlikely short of a revolutionary situation. And we have no perspective ourselves of splitting from the Labour Party, while its trade union base remains intact. We reject the strategy of tendencies [such as the Militant Tendency at that time] which see themselves as splitting from the Labour Party at a certain stage and then applying the united front to it from outside. [Militant did worse than that under Taaffe: they actually split from it and now regard it as a bourgeois party, which is a madness.] On the contrary, as far as possible our aim is to speak in the name of the Labour Party against the reformists who lead it. "Our conclusion takes us back to where we started "¦ to the contradiction between trade unions and politics, which is contained within the unity of the trade unions and the Labour Party. We have seen that the Labour Party, born out of the trade unions, is not merely one of many political organisations based on the working class, or even one of the biggest and most important, like it is on the continent. "In essentials it is the only one, for unlike on the continent where the Communist Parties of the Third International were born out of splits within social democracy, in Britain the Labour Party did not split. The Communist Party is an artificial creation, was a fusion of groups outside the Labour Party, and despite its industrial weight, it remains politically insignificant. And the split-offs to the left from the Labour Party, such as the ILP, as well as to the right, have been a split from the trade unions and have led to political destruction. "Revolutionise the trade unions and you can create the conditions, the only conditions, in which the nature of the link between the Labour Party and the trade unions can be revolutionised, in which the deformed, indirect relationship between the working class and the Labour Party can begin to be transformed, and in which a militant, conscious working class can begin to assert political control over its own organisations, wresting them out of the domination by the bourgeoisie and the labour bureaucracy. "Now this is no formula for stating that in a revolutionary upsurge the working masses will automatically flow into the Labour Party." I did not believe it then and I certainly do not believe it now. "At this stage it is quite impossible to be certain whether in revolutionary conditions the unitary nature of the British labour movement would be realised at a higher level, or whether it would decisively split under the strain. What we can and do assert is that only in those conditions would the very question be posed. Ours therefore is no formulation for turning the Labour Party into a revolutionary party, any more than we have had the perspective of turning the trade unions into a revolutionary party. Ours is a formula for a patient, consistent struggle, within these organisations, for a conscious, revolutionary alternative, rooted in militant class struggle, to help take those contradictions to the limit, and leave no stone unturned to win over, to rescue, to transform, as many sections of the official, existing labour movement into bulwarks of the revolution." All of this leads ultimately, as I said in 1978, to the demand, in revolutionary conditions, to the leaders of the labour movement: break with the bourgeoisie, take the power - which was what Trotsky said in the transitional programme, and was actually the call of the Bolsheviks, to the highest forms of the united front, the soviets, in 1917. But the problem is this. We cannot raise that question at this time in relation to the Labour Party, which is now only a shell, not a living, real Labour Party. So what conclusion do we draw? Is it that we can somehow just bypass that historical stage and create our pure revolutionary party by working with the other revolutionary groups, similar to the practice of the Weekly Worker? Is that really a way to build a revolutionary party? Or is the precondition for any revolutionary organisation a real, living labour movement and Labour Party? And in those circumstances is it not our job to actually rebuild the organisations of the labour movement, as a precondition for fighting for revolutionary leadership within it?
Worker