09.11.2006
Desperate evasion and sectarianism
A 'republican socialist party' in Britain that eschews Marxism must be a concession to nationalism. Mike Macnair responds to Dave Craig
Last week's Weekly Worker carried an argument by Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group against the idea of immediately campaigning for a Marxist party ('Marxist party - an illusion', November 2).
Comrade Craig offered several grounds for his opposition to such a campaign. He has repeatedly argued that there is political space for a mass "republican socialist party", while a Marxist party necessarily means a revolutionary party, which will in his view inevitably be a small group, and this was on display here, too. I and other CPGB comrades have already answered these arguments, which are simply based on a false analysis of current international and British political dynamics.
Apparently at least partly driven from his core argument, comrade Craig has added to it three ideas. The first is that a Marxist party necessarily means a party founded on ideology, not on programme, and may be a cover for forming a Trotskyist party: ie, another Trot sect. This is a muddled version of criticisms I have made over the past few months of aspects of the original appeal issued by Critique, and of the arguments of comrades Matthew Jones and Barry Biddulph.
The second is that there can be no Marxist party which is not part of an international: we cannot presently build an international, but can only "prepare the ground" for one; hence, to strive now to build a Marxist party in Britain would be a concession to British nationalism.
The third new element comes when comrade Craig says, following Lenin, that "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement." From this proposition we come (for the first time in comrade Craig's long succession of articles on the theme of opposition to the CPGB's supposed ultra-leftism) to the assertion that a real revolutionary international, or party, could only be built on the basis of the RDG's theory, a "new theory of permanent revolution".
At this point, we arrive at perfectly conventional Trotskyist sect politics. Comrade Craig's 'anti-sectarian' insistence on unity broader than that of the Marxists turns out to reveal the hidden secret that there can be no unity of the Marxists without agreement with the 'real Marxist theory' of the RDG - just like the Mandelite Fourth International's broad unity projects, the Socialist Workers Party/International Socialist Tendency's promotion of projects like Respect, the Committee for a Workers' International equivalents, and so on. Unity of the Marxists, going beyond unity in the supposed broad-front "republican socialist party", has to wait for us to come to agree with the "new theory of permanent revolution".
Ultra-left sectarianism
Comrade Craig concludes with the statement that "The active part of the working class is not revolutionary. But it does recognise the need for a new mass party. Communists have to be part of that struggle. We need a two-pronged approach for a mass republican socialist party and for the organisation of a Bolshevik-communist (or 'Marxist') faction within it. That independent faction must work to prepare the ground for a new world party. This means rejecting ultra-left sectarianism, which is the main barrier between revolutionaries and the working class."
The last sentence is presumably addressed to the CPGB. In fact, it should be addressed to the RDG itself.
In the first place, the statement that "The active part of the working class is not revolutionary. But it does recognise the need for a new mass party" is flatly untrue. The large majority of the "active part of the working class" today consists of militant trade unionists who either do not recognise the need for a workers' political party at all or are committed to the existing mass (bourgeois) workers' party, the Labour Party; and of Labour Party members.
The same issue is reflected at the beginning of the article, where comrade Craig says that "There is neither a mass party of the working class nor a party of the revolutionary minority." Hidden within comrade Craig's supposed rejection of ultra-left sectarianism is "¦ ultra-left sectarianism towards the Labour Party. Comraacde Craig supposes, without even bothering to argue it, that the Labour Party has ceased to be part of the workers' movement (albeit a part organically linked to the capitalist class) and become a mere capitalist party.
The CPGB has offered clear and unambiguous, albeit critical, support to John McDonnell's campaign for the Labour Party leadership, which is at present the highest expression of the left wing of Labour. Has the RDG? It is difficult to tell, because the RDG does not have its own press and comrade Craig's articles in the Weekly Worker, which are a half-substitute, are so focussed on fighting for the "republican socialist party".
A second aspect of the same problem is that the CPGB proposed a resolution to the Respect conference to support the McDonnell campaign; the SWP gritted its teeth and voted for it despite the motion's proposers (we probably should not be surprised that the SWP had not thought of putting up such a proposal itself "¦). RDG comrades, in contrast, do not have proposals to put to Respect. They chose to align themselves with comrades who opposed the idea that the left wing of the old Socialist Alliance should enter Respect and fight to build a left within it. They counterposed 'continuing Socialist Alliance' policy, then the Socialist Green Unity Coalition, which turned out to stand on no better politics than Respect itself, then a "republican Socialist Alliance".
CPGB efforts in Respect have been pretty limited, reflecting the weakness of our own forces, the determination of the SWP to run Respect as a bureaucratically controlled front and the unwillingness of much of the left to make even the attempt to fight as a minority within it. But those efforts flow from our understanding that what is necessary is for communists (Marxists) not to counterpose ourselves (or alternative fronts and blocs) to any attempt to organise the class movement and its left, however weak, but as far as possible to participate in it, and endeavour to fight within it for communist politics. The real ultra-left sectarianism is not the CPGB's fighting for communist politics and for the idea of a united party of the Marxists in Respect and elsewhere: it is the RDG's counterposing its own imagined tactical front/bloc, the hypothetical "republican socialist party", to these projects.
'Marxist'
As it happens, CPGB comrades agree with comrade Craig that 'Marxist' is not the ideal description for the sort of party we want to see created. 'Communist' in our view is the right name for such a party. And there is indeed a danger that comrades would mean by a 'Marxist party' another Trotskyist sect.
At the same time, it is not at all necessary that a 'Marxist party' should mean such a sect. In my previous articles I have repeatedly explained that what it means for CPGB comrades is at base a party which is defined by certain very basic strategic political commitments - working class political action, radical democracy, international working class unity. For the use of 'Marxist' as shorthand for this sort of politics we have a precedent in Engels, who used it repeatedly between 1889 and 1894 to contrast the 'Marxists' with the 'Possibilists', both in France and on the international stage, and with other trends.1
I cannot let pass here that comrade Craig repeats the commonplace out-of-context quote that "Marx said, 'I am not a Marxist'." We have this quotation from two places in Engels's correspondence - in both making clear that Marx was, when he said it, differentiating himself from specific features of the ideas of the French 'Marxists'.2
Rather similarly, Trotsky wrote in 1940, on hearing that Max Shachtman had described himself as a Trotskyist, "If this be Trotskyism, then I at least am no Trotskyist." But Trotsky had by the late 1930s finally embraced the use of 'Trotskyism' to describe the movement he led. He wrote in the Transitional programme that "If we are to examine 'Trotskyism' as a finished programme, and, even more to the point, as an organisation, then unquestionably 'Trotskyism' is extremely weak in the USSR. However, its indestructible force stems from the fact that it expresses not only revolutionary tradition, but also today's actual opposition of the Russian working class."3 Lenin, too, from time to time accepted the appellation 'Leninism' which was thrown at the Bolsheviks by both the bourgeois parties and the Mensheviks.4
Comrade Craig is thus quite wrong to say that "Lenin was not a Leninist and Trotsky not a Trotskyist". In all of these cases - Engels, Lenin, Trotsky - what is involved is partly accepting for the moment the name-tag given by our enemies and using it as a badge of pride; and partly using the name as shorthand for a political position. We can today use the expression 'Marxist party' in a similar way, even if it is not ideal.
RDG theory
Comrade Craig gives us the barest outline of the RDG's "new theory of permanent revolution": not enough to justify an extended reply. Suffice it to say that it is one step forward from orthodox Trotskyism, but two steps back. It is one step forward in that it grasps what the historians have shown us. This is: (a) the bourgeoisie is not a particularly democratic class and the absence of 'parliamentary democracy' in any state does not imply an 'incomplete bourgeois revolution'; (b) the motor force of the democratic movement of the late 18th and 19th century was the urban proto-proletariat and emerging proletariat, not the bourgeoisie; and (c) this expresses a class interest of the proletariat in democracy. This class interest of the proletariat in democracy was, in fact, perfectly well understood by the whole Marxist wing of the socialist movement until the Bolshevik leaders' one-sided polemics against Kautsky in 1918-20.
It is two steps back in the first place in that it fails to grasp that the specific dynamics of the Russian Revolution were given by the dominance of the peasant question, resulting from the fact that the Russian economy was still predominantly pre-capitalist and the Russian state unequivocally pre-capitalist. When Lenin, Trotsky and other Marxists debated 'stages', the economic and social predominance of peasant agriculture was the essential ground of the argument in favour of there being more than one necessary 'stage'.
Secondly, it fails to grasp that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was grounded primarily not in Russian dynamics, but in international capitalist dynamics ('combined and uneven development'), as, he argued, they affected the specific Russian case, and as, after 1917, he argued that they affected other 'backward' countries more generally. Right or wrong, without the analysis of international dynamics the argument would have been indefensible.
The result is that the RDG comrades make no analysis of global political-economic dynamics as they impose themselves on the tasks of the workers' movement in single countries today. Instead, the "new theory of permanent revolution" proposes Lenin's line of two necessary stages, in Two tactics of the social democracy in the democratic revolution,5 as a schema applicable in every country. At the same time, they give it a semi-Trotskyist coloration: the republic, which is to be the necessary first stage of the revolution, is to be a "dual power republic". By this means they have reinvented the square wheel, in the form of the Mandelites' 1970s 'theory of dual power'.
The stages mean that the national democratic revolution is to come first; then national workers' power; then, finally, international socialist revolution. This approach is exactly the Lassallean approach Marx and Engels criticised in their critiques of the 1875 Gotha programme: the international unity of the working class movement is put off till the indefinite future.
But internationalism and international class action is a present political issue, and not just one for 'revolutionary communists'. The effective conduct of the trade union struggle now demands international solidarity action. A large part of the laws that govern us are now made in Europe, so that effective political struggle needs to be conducted at a European level. Analogous phenomena affect all the continents, though (capitalist) continental integration is most advanced in Europe and north America.
Pure trade unionists, social democrats and the 'official' communists have enough nous to see this, through their commitments to nationalism, class-collaborationism and the dictatorship of the bureaucracy in their own organisations mean that their attempts to do anything about it are feeble talking shops.
Internationalism
On the practical question of internationalism comrade Craig comes up with his most astonishing claim. This is that, since we objectively need a world Marxist party, attempting to build a Marxist party in Britain is "a dead end" and that "There is no world party and we cannot form one soon. A national communist party or British Marxist party is a dangerous illusion and a capitulation to nationalism."
So what are we to do? The answer is to "build international links with other revolutionary communist groups" and (returning to the point I discussed at the beginning of the article) to fight for "a mass republican socialist party and the organisation of a Bolshevik-communist (or 'Marxist') faction within it".
But how on earth is a Marxist faction within a national "republican socialist party" any less of a national Marxist operation than an internationalist party built in a single country? If anything, we know better what such a faction is: a grouping like the International Socialist Movement platform in the Scottish Socialist Party, which dissolved itself because it saw no tasks apart from the (nationalist socialist) party as a whole.
I was for nearly 20 years a member of the British section of the Mandelite Fourth International (Unified Secretariat), and while I was I would have made claims very similar to comrade Craig's: there can be no national road to socialism; therefore there can be no national revolutionary party; therefore there is no really revolutionary politics outside the Fourth International as it exists: ie, the Usec. Of course, the Healyite International Committee, the Lambertist Fourth International (International Centre for Reconstruction), the Spartacists and more recently the International Socialist Tendency, Committee for a Workers' International and so on would all make the same claim for their 'internationals'.
At least coming from the Usec such claims had a certain limited plausibility, since with all its bad politics and pseudo-democratic parliamentary-bureaucratic functioning, the Usec was a genuine international organisation. They have always had less plausibility coming from the Healyite ICFI, FI(ICR), LIT, IST, CWI, Spartacists and so on, since these 'internationals' are plainly merely not international organisations at all, but fan clubs for their leading national groups.
It is extraordinary for a claim of this sort to be offered by the RDG, an organisation which has shown no sign whatever of endeavouring any intervention in the international movement. It is equally extraordinary for it to come from comrade Craig as an individual, since in our arguments hitherto comrade Craig as an individual has studiously avoided responding whenever I and other CPGB comrades have pointed out the ultimate failure of 'broad party' projects elsewhere (Brazil, Italy and so on). As a justification for not building a united party of the Marxists but instead embarking on a national project of building a "republican socialist party" it is utter nonsense.
The claim is also astonishing because we have only to look at how the Second International was built to see that it is untrue. Socialist, social democratic or workers' parties influenced by Marxist ideas began to develop in the several countries. And these parties then came together, first through correspondence, then through conferences which did not immediately form an organisation, then in the end to form the Second International.
The key is the small half-truth in comrade Craig's argument. Marxists have to intervene in the class struggle as it is, not as we would like it to be. In Britain, that means recognising that the class movement is dominated by pure-trade-unionism and Labourite class-collaborationist nationalism, in the Labour and trade union left by the remnants of 'official' communist ideology, and to the left of Labour by the bureaucratic centralist sects: and intervening in this movement as it is, as far as possible, to fight for a united party of the Marxists, on the basis of a Marxist programme, which could actually fight effectively against Labourism. The "republican socialist party" project is precisely an attempt by the RDG comrades to imagine that the movement is as they would wish it to be: simultaneously it is ultra-left sectarian in relation to Labour and to the SWP, and opportunist in its refusal to confront the practical tasks of internationalism.
The same holds true on the international level. The problem is not that there is no international at all: this would allow us to simply build internationalist parties, and from these a new international, as the Second International did. The problem is that there are too many existing dead-end internationals. There are two international trade union confederations. There is the Socialist International, a more or less open agency of imperialist policy. There is the quasi-international of the surviving 'official' communist parties meeting in Lisbon next weekend. There are the multifarious Trotskyist 'internationals'. There are some even smaller left and council communist 'internationals'. And there is more than one international coordination of the Maoists. Since 2001, the World Social Forums and continental equivalents have provided episodic talking shops, bureaucratically controlled by the Brazilian Workers Party and its co-thinkers through the exploitation of anarchist organisational norms in the defence of the interests of the class-collaborationists.
Just as at a national level, the task of Marxists is to intervene in the dreadful movement as it is to fight for unity of the Marxists on the basis of a Marxist programme, so too at an international level. This has been the burden of the CPGB's attempts to intervene in the European Social Forum. Yes, indeed, we need to cultivate links with other Marxists internationally. But we can identify our common ground and our differences with other Marxists internationally, and hence move potentially towards a new international, to the extent to which we develop a common struggle for Marxist politics in the movement as it exists.
At this point we return to the beginning. The problem with comrade Craig's argument is that it contains within it an underlying organisational sectarianism towards the actual existing class movement from Labour leftwards, and sectarian defence of the existence of the RDG as an independent organisation. The alternative would be the willingness of the RDG to fight for its ideas (which I think are wrong) as a faction within the framework of a broader unity of the Marxists. Comrade Craig's arguments are ever more desperate attempts to avoid that conclusion.