WeeklyWorker

04.01.2007

Chartism - the second coming

Does the Revolutionary Democratic Group have a sectarian attitude to mass workers' party projects? Dave Craig replies to Mike Macnair's criticisms

The purpose of this article is to begin a reply to Mike Macnair's article, published in the Weekly Worker last year.[1]  The Revolutionary Democratic Group has argued that communists should be campaigning for a mass republican socialist party and for a communist (Bolshevik or revolutionary Marxist) faction within it. The closest example today is the Scottish Socialist Party, before the split, and the Republican Communist Network, a platform within it.

Mike makes a number of criticisms of this, some directed against the mass party and others against our views on revolutionary factions and parties. Here I intend to restate the arguments for a mass party and deal with Mike's specific criticisms at the end. I will address Mike's points about the Marxist party, permanent revolution and communist politics in a subsequent article.

Chartism

Tony Cliff begins his book on the Labour Party with a quote from Ramsay MacDonald. In 1911 MacDonald claimed that "the Labour Party is the only political form which evolutionary socialism can take in a country with the political traditions of Great Britain".[2]  Cliff says: "This statement is false."

He goes on to explain that the British working class gave mass support to political ideas that were in sharp contrast to Labourism. Between 1839 and 1848 the workers supported Chartism. He says that "unlike the Labour Party they [the Chartist workers] rejected the legal framework of existing society".[3]  This legal framework is, of course, the political laws or constitution of the country.

The most important constitutional demand of the Chartists was universal suffrage. It is a demand long since conceded. But at the time the ruling class were fearful of the consequences this would have on their political power and were determined to resist. The mood of the ruling class was expressed by Thomas Macaulay for the Whigs in the Commons. He was clear that universal suffrage "was incompatible to the very existence of civilisation".[4]

Chartism reminds us that even limited democratic demands, which capitalism can easily adopt, at least in theory, can become or be seen as a challenge to class rule itself. The six demands of the People's Charter were:

Such demands in themselves were eminently moderate - they did not even include the call for votes for women. Yet in 1839 several thousand Chartist miners in Newport took part in an armed uprising for these aims. In 1842 workers launched a general strike which supported the Charter. Moderate aims were backed by militant action and met by the authorities ready to crush the movement by force.

Democratic demands unified a broad class movement. Behind this came a social movement, which took on radical, if not revolutionary, dimensions. Chartism proposed "an alternative culture for the working class, with control over their workplace, the education of their children and their leisure time ... publishing their own papers and books, performing plays, singing protest hymns".[5]

In 1840 the Chartist movement formed the National Charter Association, the "first ever working class political party".[6]  This cannot be considered a revolutionary party. It contained both a "moral force" or reformist wing and a "physical force" or revolutionary wing. Neither was it a purely working class movement. Despite these divisions, "it was able to weld together class consciousness with political consciousness and to articulate this potent mixture".[7]

Chartism was, as Cliff says, "unashamedly" a class movement. Its revolutionary significance lay in broad unity around relatively moderate political demands which mobilised mass direct working class political activity. After the defeat of Chartism, the trade union leaders turned the movement away from political struggle and towards becoming an appendage of the Liberal Party.

Chartism and Labourism as opposites

Labourism became possible as a mass party because of the achievement of universal male suffrage. Although Chartism was defeated in 1848, it must take some credit for placing its demands for extended democracy on the national agenda. Yet Chartism and Labourism can be seen as opposites in terms of mass working class politics.

Chartism was a political movement which sought democratic political change as a prerequisite for social change. Chartists reasoned that by winning their democratic demands this would pave the way for working class rule. It would then become possible to repeal the Act of Union, which oppressed the Irish, and scrap the Poor Law, which put the unemployed in the workhouse.

Labourism starts from the opposite assumption. There is no need to change the political power structure. The existing constitution is an adequate means through which social change can be achieved. Social reform, not constitutional change, is required. From this flows the idea about the proper role for trade unions. It is not to interfere in political-constitutional affairs, which should be left to the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Cliff identifies this sharp division at the heart of Labourism. Trade unions deal with wages and conditions, while MPs deal with politics. He says that "in the Chartist period there was no barrier between political and industrial activity".[8]  The Chartist Convention of 1839 took the unanimous view that nothing less than a general strike will be necessary to win "the rights and liberties of the industrial classes".[9]

General strikes

In 1842 the first general strike took place. It began over threatened wage cuts and involved over half a million workers. But it soon took a political direction, as the idea spread from factory to factory that workers would strike for the Charter.[10]  Although economic in its immediate cause, the strike took on a political character as a general strike for the democracy represented in the Charter.[11]

The Chartist general strike stands in contrast to the Labourite general strike of 1926. The TUC leaders were absolutely determined to limit it to wage issues - although this did not prevent the Tory government claiming the strike threatened the constitution. The Labour and trade union leaders were desperate to dissociate themselves from any notion they were challenging the constitution or the state and promoted the solely economistic nature of the dispute.

Red republicanism

Labourism became the negation of Chartism. It turned the political strategy of Chartism upside down. Chartism was extinguished and Labourism triumphed. Yet in the logic of the dialectic, the negation will itself be negated. Labourism will be overcome by Chartism. Not, of course, the Chartism of the 1840s. The new Chartism will not simply repeat the original. It will take a higher or more advanced form.

Chartism was not a republican movement. If its demands had been won, we would have achieved a reformed constitutional monarchy. Yet Chartism contained the seeds and implication of republicanism. Many working class radicals had Jacobin and republican sympathies. For example, her majesty's inspector of prisons interviewed William Benbow, a Chartist and editor of radical journals, imprisoned for sedition in 1840. The inspector reports that, "although Benbow is 56 years old, his support for republicanism remains undiminished".[12]  Amongst many Chartist papers we find, for example, Peter McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, produced in Manchester from 1841.[13]

The new Chartism will obviously not be focused on the demand for universal suffrage. Eighty years since the women's suffrage movement won its struggle, we understand there is much more to democratic government than the right to vote every five years. Any new Chartism will start from what has already been won.

The dialectic finds clues to the new Chartism in the contradictions within the old movement. In 1850 Chartism had effectively split. On the left side we find George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones, whose politics were republican and socialist. Harney edited a new paper, the Red Republican. This published the first edition in English of the Communist manifesto.[14]  A new form of Chartism must take this as its point of departure - democratic republicanism linked to socialism. This would be a negation of modern Labourism.

Trotsky on Chartism

Trotsky wrote about Chartism. It is worth quoting him in full. He says: "The era of Chartism is immortal in that over the course of a decade it gives us in condensed and diagrammatic form the whole gamut of proletarian struggle - from petitions to parliament, to armed insurrections. All the fundamental problems of the class movement of the proletariat - the interrelation between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary activity, the role of universal suffrage, trade unions and cooperation, the significance of the general strike and its relation to armed insurrection, even the interrelation between the proletariat and the peasantry - were not only crystallised out of the progress of the Chartist mass movement, but found in it their principled answer."[15]

Trotsky did not, however, content himself with seeing Chartism as a history lesson for the working class. He says: "To use a hazardous comparison then, it can be said that the Chartist movement resembles a prelude which contains in an undeveloped form its musical theme of the whole opera. In this sense the British working class can and must see in Chartism not only the past, but also its future."[16]

For Trotsky, the dialectic warns us against the simplistic and seemingly obvious view that the political approach of Chartism had disappeared for good. He emphasises its relevance for the future. He says: "Chartism is not at all liquidated. History is liquidating liberalism and prepares to liquidate pseudo-Labour pacifism precisely so as to give a second birth to Chartism on new, immeasurably broader historical foundations. That is where you have the real national tradition of the British labour movement."[17]

We can see from our vantage point that Trotsky was premature in predicting an early end to Labourism, pushed aside by a second birth of Chartism. Perhaps in the revolutionary circumstances of the early 1920s it seemed on the cards. Today it is not too fanciful to see Labourism as being liquidated from one side by New Labour. On the other side is the opposite - recognition that to revive the fortunes of the working class we need a new mass party with radical democratic and social aims, working in cooperation with a more political type of trade unionism.

From Chartism to republican socialism

The slogan of a republican socialist party promotes the need for a such a party. It stands on the shoulders of Chartism and against the politics of Labourism. For the basis of this party we can defer to Mike Macnair.[18]  Mike says we need a party with three very general principles: "First, it stands for the idea that the working class ... should run society." This is surely a reference to the aim of socialism and common ownership. "Second, it stands for extreme democracy or democratic republicanism, both in the state and the workers' movement." And "Third, it stands for international working class solidarity."

Mike's three principles must be the common currency for all those fighting for a mass republican socialist party. But Mike has another principle, which is the elephant in the room. He does not mention it, but we can hardly avoid seeing it. The mass party must also be "Marxist". The masses must accept revolutionary Marxism as the basis of the party. This takes us back to the question of the mass working class party.

The mass party of reform

The working class, exploited and divided by capitalism, inevitably and spontaneously fights for reforms which improve its economic and social position. Trade unions are working class organisations which fight for such reforms and are an expression of the desire of working people to achieve them. In effect unions are mass 'parties' representing different sections of the class, such as railworkers, civil servants, teachers, dockers and engineers, etc. Workers in each union develop sectional programmes for reforms in wages, conditions and social welfare in their workplaces and industries.

The formation of a mass party of reform to represent the working class is a logical extension of the trade union struggle into the sphere of politics and government. This does not define the kind of relationship between the party and unions. Chartism and Labourism were mass parties with two very different ideas about the relationship of economic and political struggle. The former considered it necessary and legitimate for trade unions to take strike action for political reforms.

The mass party of reform exists because certain conditions make it seem a viable strategy for the mass of the working class. These include the level of class political consciousness amongst the workers. Capitalism must have the capacity to provide reforms. There must be liberal democracy, enabling workers to freely organise and fight for reform. There must be economic and political stability so that the struggle for reform seems to be a viable strategy.

The Labour Party had a mass membership and millions of votes. In 1931 it had 297,000 members. This rose to 447,000 in 1937 and peaked in 1952 at 1,015,000. In 1961 there were still 751,000 members. This fell to 660,000 in 1978 and down to 303,000 by 1981.[19]  Today it is closer to 200,000. Mention should also be made of German Social Democracy in the 1890s as a mass party of reform.

By contrast the membership of the CPGB was on a completely different scale. In 1921 the CPGB had about 2,000 members, rising to 6,000 by 1926 and falling to 3,200 in 1929. In 1932 it was 9,000,[20]  rising to 12,500 in 1937.[21]

In January 1917 the Bolshevik Party had 23,600 members. It was relatively small. By April 1917 this had risen to 79,204. In July there were 240,000 members and in the spring of 1918 300,000.[22]  The Bolsheviks became a mass working class party on a scale easily comparable with the Labour Party, if we take account of Russia as a largely peasant country.

The mass Bolshevik Party proved that in certain circumstances the mass of the working class would become a revolutionary class, as Marx had predicted. The rapid growth of the Bolsheviks reflected the revolutionary process and the intensification of class struggle, which produced a mass and rapid political education for the working class. The class became revolutionary as a result of the revolution and the organisation and leadership of the Bolsheviks. Without a mass revolutionary workers' party the October revolution would never have happened.

The point here is that the mass party is not inevitably 'reformist'. Neither is it true that trade unions will only support reformist-dominated mass parties like the Labour Party. But in the conditions as they exist today in Britain a mass revolutionary party is not possible. It is a piece of utopian dreaming not to face the truth. If there is to be a mass workers' party in Britain now or in the near future it will be a mass party fighting for reform. It will not be a genuine revolutionary Marxist party.

One party or two?

In Britain from 1920 to 1990 the working class was represented by two parties, the Labour Party and the CPGB. The former was the mass party not only because of its size and votes, but because it was closely connected with the trade unions as mass organisations. Under the influence of Stalinism the CPGB, although formally representing the revolutionary minority, came in practice to stand for militant trade unionism, at least until the 1960s. By then Trotskyism was starting to offer an alternative.

The Labour Party and the CPGB formed a 'dual system' of class representation. The programme of the British road to socialism, along with the tactics of 'broad leftism', provided the glue which bound the two parties together in a unity of opposites. By the 1990s this dual system had begun breaking down after the defeat of the miners in 1984-85, the end of the USSR and the rise of New Labour.

Chartism united the working class around one party. It contained within its ranks the struggle between reformist and revolutionary trends. In Britain today the crisis of Labourism and the possibility of forming a new party takes us back, not to the revolutionary situation of 1918-20, but to 1901, when Labour was formed, or to the period after the 1832 Reform Act, when the working class recognised that democratic constitutional change was vital to advance their interests.

The current CPGB is still wedded to the old dual party system, in which there is a Marxist party to stand alongside the Labour Party. We want to see the end of this. We want a split between the liberal and socialist wings of Labour, and the unification of the advanced part of the working class, with socialists and communists in one party - not, of course, a new Labour Party, but a party founded on the radical democratic traditions of Chartism.

Marx and one huge army

What attitude should communists take to the formation of a new mass party of reform? Should we oppose it on the grounds that it is not revolutionary or Marxist? This is a question of tactics, not principle. In 1920 Lenin urged the affiliation of the CPGB to the Labour Party. At other times Trotskyists have entered mass parties as a faction. The role of the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party is an example.

In this case we are dealing with the attitude to the formation of a mass party of reform. The most relevant example is Marx's attitude to the formation of the First International. The International involved a broad spectrum of working class politics, including English trade unionists. By all accounts it was a halfway house. But Marx did not take a sectarian attitude to the movement. Neither did he hold back so that he could evade responsibility for any of its mistakes. Marx fully involved himself in the International from the beginning.

Engels explains the attitude of Marx and himself: "Its aim was to weld together into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid down in the [Communist] Manifesto. It was bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on English trade unionists, the French, Belgian, Italian and Spanish Proudhonists and German Lassalleans."[23]

Ryazanov in his Karl Marx and Frederick Engels says that the First International was a "united front" and that Marx's inaugural address "formulated demands and emphasised points on which the existing movement could unite and on the basis that a further development of the labour movement could be expected".[24]

Marx approached the task of building this international workers' united front positively. The new programme (the inaugural address) "had to be written in a manner which takes account of the low level of proletarian class consciousness among the masses and leaders".[25]  By his involvement in the process Marx was able to maintain certain basic principles, alongside some necessary compromises.

Political conditions in Britain today

Let us leave behind our historical-theoretical arguments and turn instead to the political conditions in Britain, and more particularly in England, today. Global capitalism is rampant. The planet is threatened by global warming and environmental destruction. The social gains and civil liberties of the past are under attack. What objective factors can we expect to shape political consciousness in the working class in the next period? Our underlying assumption is that we are not in a revolutionary situation or even a rising level of class struggle. The working class movement is still largely on the defensive.

Crisis of democracy

It is widely accepted that parliamentary democracy is failing. This is the conclusion of the Power Commission report, called Power to the people, chaired by Helena Kennedy. The report is described in The Independent as "a plan to revive Britain's dying democracy".[26]  There is a massive gap between the government and the governed. People feel voting brings no influence over decisions that affect them. It says that "there is an overwhelming desire for change among the British people".

The report warns that "democracy faces a meltdown in Britain, as the public rejects an outdated political system which has centralised more authority than ever in a tiny ruling elite". It points to the feeble and supine nature of parliament. Parliament failed to make a serious investigation into the Iraq war or extract details about the cost of identity cards. On the other side of the coin we have an executive "more powerful than it probably has been since the time of Walpole".

A recent survey in The Sunday Telegraph asks whether people in England are in favour of having their own parliament with similar powers to the Scottish parliament.[27] Sixty-eight percent were in favour. Should Scotland become an independent country? Fifty-two percent of Scottish people and 58% of English were in favour. This is a measure of a significant level of popular dissatisfaction with the current constitutional arrangements. What can we conclude from all this? The British system of government is in crisis. People have no confidence in it. The workers' movement will not be able to avoid the issue for ever.

The Iraq war did not create the crisis of democracy. It simply brought it to the attention of many millions. George Galloway pointed out that "Every MP who voted for the war did so knowing that their constituents were against it. And most did so knowing it was wrong". He went on to say that the parliamentary system "is completely unresponsive in the face of public opinion on a whole range of issues, not simply on the war. Things happen now on the electoral level, on the civil liberties front, across a whole swathe of issues."[28]

Crisis of working class political representation

The Labour government supports a raft of anti-working class policies, such as the anti-union laws, privatising the NHS, cutting pensions, occupying Iraq and attacking civil liberties. As a consequence Labour is facing a serious crisis. Membership is falling. The party is heavily in debt and trade unionists are disillusioned. The Rail Maritime and Transport union and the Fire Brigades Union are no longer affiliated to Labour.

The more politically conscious part of the working class recognises the movement has no independent political representation. Influence over political decisions is at best minimal and in practice non-existent. The bankruptcy of Labour, both politically and financially, goes hand in hand with the failure of parliamentary democracy to represent the people. The crisis of Labourism coincides and connects with a crisis of democracy.

New epoch and new opportunities

The crisis of political representation points to a new period in class politics. The pendulum will not simply swing back to the mythical good old days, when the Tories represented the bosses in top hats and Labour was for the workers in cloth caps, standing shoulder to shoulder with a resurrected Marxist party of Great Britain. We only need look to Scotland to see things taking a different direction. This is already having an impact in England and Wales. It presents new tasks and new opportunities for the reorganisation of working class politics.

Today there is a movement for a mass working class party of reform. This movement is not necessarily coherent or united. But it includes trade unions like the RMT and all those who once gathered around the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Alliance, and now Respect, the Campaign for a New Workers' Party and the Labour Representation Committee. All these organisations are struggling with the fallout from the collapse of the old Labour-CPGB dual system of class representation.

The politics of this movement are shaped by the struggle between the opposite poles of Labourism and Trotskyism. The LRC represents the most thoroughly Labourite wing. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party stand for Trotskyism. In Respect we see one form of this synthesis in the unity of Galloway and the SWP. So far these various syntheses of Labourism-Trotskyism have produced one outcome - Labourism.

British Trotskyism is thoroughly economistic. When it confronts the remnants of left Labourism, it immediately capitulates. It cannot go beyond a minimum programme of economic and social reforms. It can only think to unite with Labourism on the basis of Labourism. What a crying shame Trotskyism cannot take notice of the insights that Trotsky had looking at the British labour movement from the outside.

Mike's criticisms

Mike Macnair's November 9 2006 article deals with two questions - the mass workers' party and the Marxist party. He argues that the RDG has a sectarian attitude to the mass workers' party. This stems from the slogan of a republican socialist party, which is "hypothetical" and "based on an imagined tactical front or bloc" - an invention conjured up out of nowhere and set against the real movement of the class.

Now it is true that the republican socialist party is a theoretical concept. No such party actually exists in England today. But it would be a foolish mistake to draw the wrong conclusion from this. The theory of a republican socialist party comes from the historical experience of the working class, which includes the first mass democratic movement and party in Chartism. Labourism is not therefore the only mass working class political tradition in Britain.

The republican socialist party slogan is not wrong, as Mike claims, because it is a theory derived from class experience. However, like any sound theory, it does not stand against the mass movement, but in critical relation to it. It goes against the natural or spontaneous tendency of the workers' movement to adopt the false ideology of Labourism. To ignore the political heritage of Chartism and oppose a republican socialist party is to play the toady for economism and Labourism.

The Scottish Socialist Party shows that a republican socialist party is not just theory. The SSP has gone a long way towards such a party with the demand for a Scottish republic linked to socialism. If it is a practical theory in Scotland, it is also possible in England and across Britain. But it will require a successful ideological struggle in our Labourite socialist movement to free it from Labourism in all its guises.

Mike claims we counterpoise the slogan of a republican socialist party to the movement of the class. This is the opposite of what is argued here. The slogan flows out of the dialectical movement itself, from Chartism to Labourism, and back to a higher form of Chartism. The new emerging forms, such as Respect, coming from a synthesis of Labourism and Trotskyism will stand or fall in relation to the dialectic. We are not therefore inventing a slogan against the movement, but simply pointing out the alternative direction the workers' movement will need to take.

Mike then argues that the practical consequence of the republican socialist party slogan is "an ultra-left, sectarian attitude towards the Labour Party". Now it is true we are totally opposed to the capitalist Labour government. But we have no illusions and make no excuses for the party that supports and sustains this reactionary anti-working class government. It is not "sectarian" to be hostile to Labour.

Of course we should form a united front with John McDonnell and other socialist opposition to the Labour government. But we must not pander to their fruitless quest for a better Labour Party. The mass party question must be raised inside their campaign, even though it will not be popular to do so now.

In the McDonnell campaign the CPGB has promoted republicanism, but not party. It has failed to argue for a different kind of mass party, like Chartism, which is republican, socialist and internationalist. Avoiding the party question means being soft on the McDonnell campaign and the Labour Party. It goes back to the two-party model behind the British road to socialism - Labourites for the Labour Party and Marxists for the Marxist party.

Finally Mike says the call for a republican socialist party means we "do not have any proposals to put to Respect". This is the very opposite of the case. Respect is a pale shadow of Labourism. It does not stand in the democratic tradition of Chartism. It is not republican, is hardly socialist and is not a party. Respect must change direction. Our theory says Respect must adopt a democratic, secular, republican programme. It must work for left unity with the Socialist Party, the Labour Representation Committee, with muslim workers and trade unionists for the launch of a new workers' party opposed to Labourism.

'Marxists for the Marxist Party' will cut no ice with Respect or the SWP. This is why the CPGB does not raise the party question inside Respect.

Notes

 1. ‘Desperate evasion and sectarianism’ Weekly Worker November 9 2006.
 2. T Cliff and D Gluckstein The Labour Party - a Marxist history p5.
 3. Ibid.
 4. Ibid.
 5. D Thompson The Chartists New York 1984, cover page.
 6. M Davis Comrade or brother? London 1993, p48.
 7. Ibid p49.
 8. T Cliff and D Gluckstein The Labour Party - a Marxist history p6.
 9. M Jenkins The general strike of 1842 London 1980, p37.
 10. D Thompson The Chartists New York 1984, p284.
 11. M Davis Comrade or brother? London 1993, p50.
 12. D Thompson The Chartists New York 1984, p38.
 13. Ibid p43.
 14. Comrade or brother? M Davis London 1993, p54.
 15. Trotsky’s writings on Britain Vol 2, London 1974, p93.
 16. Ibid p94.
 17. Ibid p94.
 18. Weekly Worker November 2.
 19. D Hallas International Socialism spring 1982.
 20. H Dewar Communist politics in Britain London 1976, p93.
 21. Ibid p118.
 22. T Cliff Lenin Vol 2, p160.
 23. Preface to the German edition of the Communist Manifesto 1890.
 24. D Stocking From communism to social democracy p24.
 25. Ibid, quoting Ryazanov Karl Marx and F Engels.
 26. Power Commission Power to the people, cited in The Independent February 27.
 27. The Sunday Telegraph November 26.
 28. Weekly Worker December 4 2003.