27.11.2008
Sects, states, and soviets
Mike Macnair defends his book and debunks some far-left misconceptions
On October 30 the Weekly Worker published John Robinson’s “comradely criticism” of my book Revolutionary strategy.1 Comrade Robinson takes me to task for failure to grasp the role of soviet power in creating “mass communist consciousness”, for illusions in the capitalist state and for failing to indicate how a new revolutionary international can be created. As the alternative to these supposed errors, he commends the centrality of “Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism)”; and the practical example of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction, or JRCL-Kakumaru), and the theoretical work of its late leader, Kan’ichi Kuroda, who died in 2006.
Comrade Robinson is a former militant of Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, which spectacularly imploded and fragmented in 1985. At its height the WRP was the strongest organisation of the British far left. The fragmentation made clear that the WRP, for all its apparent strength relative to other groups, had actually evolved into a cult organisation of the same type as the Branch Davidians and other religious fringe cults: only the quasi-religious guru role of Healy held it together. The phenomenon is, in fact, not uncommon on the far left, though it usually takes less extreme forms.
Those former WRP members who have remained in politics have gone in a wide range of political directions. Comrade Robinson seems to have found in the JRCL-Kakumaru an organisation to support which has marked similarities to late-period Healyism: emphasis on Hegelian readings of Marx and the dialectic, the promotion of illusions in its own strength and the threat it poses to the state, and characterisation of its political opponents on the left as state agents. The JRCL-Kakumaru displayed two of these features in stark form when in January 2007 it announced the “complete victory in our struggle to disband the group of the state tool” - its larger rival, the JRCL-Chukaku-ha. However, the Japanese internal security service, as of early 2008, thought JRCL-Chukakuha was not ‘disbanded’ but still around and active.2
The JRCL-Kakumaru represents a ‘leftist’ and extreme version of these characteristics. But the same ideas are more or less widely present in the British far left in a milder and ‘rightist’ form. The British Socialist Workers Party has in its recent past similarly promoted Hegelian Marxism (John Rees’s book on the dialectic)3 and wild illusions in its own strength and impact. And if calling political opponents state agents has been largely absent (outside Scotland) the party effectively pretends they do not exist.
The common ground goes back some time: Kuroda had articles published in International Socialism in 1960 and 1962.4 Both the SWP and the JRCL, in fact - like much of today’s far left - were part of a ‘new left’ emerging after the crisis of the international communist movement produced by the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and its suppression. Hegelian Marxism was part of these groups’ common ‘newness’. The present general weakness of the far left is at least partly caused by the distinctive features of the ‘new left’, particularly Hegelian Marxism and its associated ideas. These ideas function to nourish illusions in the usefulness of sects. By doing so, they work to block effective unification of the Marxist left.
This general character of something that takes extreme forms in the groups descended from the JRCL make a reply to comrade Robinson something more than a reply to one of the few British hangers-on of a Japanese group. Rather comrade Robinson expresses some common political and theoretical errors of the ‘new left’-influenced groups. The core of these common errors is a profound misunderstanding of the movement of mass class-consciousness; but this can be seen refracted in different ways in relation to the question of the capitalist state, dual power and soviets, and ‘Marxist philosophy’ and the dialectic. This reply will have two parts: the first on the capitalist state, dual power and soviets, the second on the philosophical question.
International
I should first get out of the way a misconceived point. Comrade Robinson agrees with me that the building of an organised world communist movement, an international, is necessary. However, he states: “Unfortunately Mike is unable to say how such a world movement can be built.” He goes on to say that “one of the few communist organisations to take seriously the task of building a world movement is the Japan Revolutionary Communist League. The JRCL undertakes this task mainly through its attempts to build a worldwide anti-war movement.”
The point is misconceived because the JRCL-Kakumaru is not “one of the few communist organisations to take seriously the task of building a world movement”. On the contrary, the ‘official communists’ have organised a series of international conferences; several of the surviving Maoist trends organise internationally; and nearly every large or small Trotskyist group either sponsors an ‘international’ or is part of one led from another country. The problem, then, is not that there is no international movement, but that there are too many ‘internationals’ for any of them to be taken seriously. The solution is - just as it is on the national level - for the disorganised and splintered international movement to unify itself. Front organisations led by a single party, like the JRCL-Kakumaru’s “anti-war movement”, are not part of the solution, but part of the problem. The solution can only begin with grasping the existence of international tasks, as opposed to the idea that there will be a ‘leading party’ like the CPSU in the Comintern.
How can a world movement be built? The only possible answer is by intervening in the existing fragmented movement to fight for the sort of ideas about the tasks and organisational forms of an international which would make it possible to overcome the current fragmentation. For the present it is necessarily a battle of ideas. My book and in particular the chapter on the necessity of an international attempts to contribute to that battle of ideas.
The capitalist state
Comrade Robinson says, “… it is clear that comrade Mike fails to understand the absolutely counterrevolutionary character of the capitalist state.” To confirm this view, he proceeds to quote a passage of my book which summarises Kautsky’s views (p57). He omits the fact that immediately after the passage quoted, I proceed to criticise these views - among other things, for imagining that the working class can take hold of and use the existing state machine.
In fact, the first criticism I make of the centre tendency in the Second International is to say that the redistributed spoils of imperialism make it unlikely that a party which stands for the overthrow of the capitalist state and economic order and the transfer of power to the working class - a communist party - will win an electoral majority in any imperialist country outside conditions of severe crisis (p57).
Nonetheless, I do not exclude the possibility that a communist party can win an electoral majority, and then use that majority of the popular vote (not necessarily parliamentary majority) as a political mandate for mass action to break up the existing bureaucratic-coercive state machine and transfer power to the working class.
In the first place, it is clear that revolutionary crises have in the past been triggered by left coalitions winning electoral majorities in parliamentary or semi-parliamentary regimes, leading to large-scale direct intervention of the masses in political life. The Spanish revolution of the 1930s is such a case, and similar events have happened several times in Latin America, most recently in Venezuela.
Secondly, it is foolish to suppose that this possibility is an argument for demobilising the masses (‘Wait for the government, comrades ...’). In order for a communist party to have any chance of winning a majority in the popular vote, it is necessary that the broad mass of the working class should be deeply organised in a mass communist party, trade unions, cooperatives, etc, and widely mobilised to turn out the vote - which implies also being actively mobilised and organised between election times.
It is also necessary that the communist party should say plainly what it means to do if it obtains a majority, so that the broad masses are not being invited to vote for the party on a false prospectus. ‘Conning the masses into taking power’ will generally not succeed: the capitalist state and parties will be able to use the hidden ideas of the communists as a way of saying that communists cannot be trusted. That means in particular clear constitutional proposals for taking power away from the capitalist oligarchs and transferring it to the working class.
Comrade Robinson goes on to outline his own view of the capitalist state, and it is wildly ultra-left. (By that statement I mean that comrade Robinson holds views close to those of the targets of Lenin’s Left-wing communism or to the Stalinists in the ‘third period’.) He writes: “Parliament basically wields no real power in Britain. It is a sort of Punch and Judy show designed to fool workers into believing that by putting a cross against a name every so often they thereby have a say in how the country is to be run.
“Power in Britain is held by what is sometimes referred to as ‘state within a state’. This includes the privy council, the higher civil service, the armed forces general staff, industrialists, landowners and representatives of the major banks.”
The second paragraph here is a classic 1960s view of ‘the establishment’. Leave aside the peculiar idea that the privy council is part of the ‘state within a state’: this body is a court of appeal for some purposes, but otherwise purely ‘ceremonial’. More generally, capitalist class control of the state is more complex than the “state within a state” idea suggests. But for the sake of argument assume that it is true: because it certainly is true that parliament does not directly control state policy even to the limited extent that in did in the 18th century.
Two problems are then posed. The first is that comrade Robinson describes as the “state within a state” an unorganised group, of which part are state officials and part sectors of the capitalist class or their agents. How does this group make decisions when they disagree among themselves? The second is: how does this small group of people get large numbers of other people, their subordinates, to do what the small group of decision-makers want?
Capitalist state decision-making
Capitalists have common interests as against those of the working class. But they are also divided. They have conflicting interests too. Individual firms in the same sector are in direct competition with each other; and the sectors and the state are in competition with each other for shares of the social surplus product. The landowner sector, which was once politically ascendant, now has only limited political power. Britain has in the last century moved from an ascendancy of the banking and commercial sectors in the early 20th century to an ascendancy of industrial capital in the 1950s-70s, to a revived and increased ascendancy of the financial sector since the 1980s.
Equally, both the capitalists and the state core may be divided over questions of strategy and tactics. We have recently seen an example of this in the 2002-03 crisis over the Iraq war: the strength of the anti-war movement reflected not the strength of the left, but the divisions in the capitalist class and the state core. In this case the general staff and the security apparat were overridden by the bankers’ and politicians’ decisions about the interests of the UK in its alliance with the US.
To act together, the capitalists and the state core need decision-making mechanisms to settle their disagreements (at least temporarily). From the time of the revolution of 1688, parliament and elections to parliament has acted as one of these decision-making mechanisms. It is possible for the capitalist state to function with an alternative decision-making mechanism that of a military dictator or junta. But this mechanism is, other things apart, more expensive to capital and less effective in mobilising capitalist consent to decisions than parliamentary bodies.
The capitalists, in fact, control parliaments. They do so through the corrupt duopoly of professional politicians in the two-party system, and through control of the mass media allowing the manipulation of the ‘swing’ vote in the centre. We have just seen a spectacular example in the USA - the decision of the majority (by money share) of capitalist donors to go with Barack Obama and the Democrats. We seem to be seeing a similar process in the UK: the majority of big capitals backs the Labour government’s bail-out operations, and is hostile to Tory opposition to them. So the media coverage has swung away from negative stories about Labour, carrying with it the opinion polls.
Of course, it is true that a great deal of what happens in parliament is a “Punch and Judy show”: ‘prime minister’s questions’ is the obvious example. But it is also true nonetheless that by making parliamentary majorities through party and media manipulation, the capitalist class selects governments, and governments take real decisions, choosing between the competing interests and opposing views of different capitalists and state actors.
Mobilising grunt consent
Assume that the UK “state within a state” takes the actual decisions, as comrade Robinson argues. The second problem is: how do they get their decisions carried out? The answer is in the first place that around 500,000 armed forces personnel, 140,000 police officers, 500,000 civil servants and over a million local government officers are employed in executing government decisions.5 If these state officials simply failed en masse to do what they were told, the decisions of the “state within a state” would not be implemented. If this happens on a large enough scale or to the armed forces in particular, the result is revolutionary crisis.
At a second level, these two to three million state officials are far too small a group to keep guns continuously pointing at the 51 million people above the age of 14 in this country in order to make them do what they are told by our rulers. At this level, too, compliance depends on the population being willing to ‘put up with’ or tolerate the existing state power and the decisions it takes. The second level is importantly distinct from the first. Many state actions do not require the active compliance of the subject population, merely its non-resistance. This non-resistance is primarily supported by the “dull compulsion of economic relations” rather than either the immediate and general use of force, or any ‘hegemonic ideology’.6
But the decision-makers in the “state within a state” require more of the subordinate state officials than passive non-resistance. They require their active cooperation.7 So the lower state officials have to believe that the people who give them orders have political authority or ‘legitimacy’ in order to induce them to carry the orders out.
This state authority is in a sense very like religion - a point Marx made in his Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right: it consists in the belief of the subordinates that the decision-makers have authority. If the belief evaporates, the state collapses. Below this belief is a very crude material level: state success promotes state ‘legitimacy’, and failure - especially defeat in war, but also economic crisis and state failure to cope with natural disasters - undermines it. Hence the point made earlier about imperialism: state relative success in competition with other states, expressed in imperialist standing, promotes state ‘legitimacy’, while semi-colonial subordination undermines state ‘legitimacy’.
But state authority can no more express itself to the subordinate officials as ‘might makes right’, or the right of the small minority “state within a state” to take decisions, than medieval religious authority can express itself as the right of a small group of Italian aristocrats to nominate popes to receive tribute from and take decisions for the churches of western Christendom, or the current Iranian regime can express itself as the right of individual mullahs to steal from the rest of the society. The loyalty of subordinate medieval priests was to the pope as god’s representative; the loyalty of Iranian subordinate state officials is to Allah and the ‘Islamic revolution’; the loyalty of subordinate state officials is not to the individual decision-makers, but to an idea of the state.
In England since 1688, the idea of the state to which the officials are loyal is the idea of the constitution: constitutional monarchy and the ‘ancient constitution’ stretching through imperceptible changes back into the middle ages; parliamentary sovereignty (and the self-image of the regime as ‘democratic’) and the rule of law and natural or ‘human’ rights (especially the right of private property). Like medieval religion, these ideas are taught in schools and routinely re-enacted as rituals (queen’s opening of parliament, etc).
These ideas are, of course, in contradiction with one another. The poles of the contradiction move. The rise of a deformed sort of working class political representation, the Labour Party, has resulted in a decline of the parliamentary and ‘democratic’ aspect of the constitution relative to monarchism and the direct authority of the executive. In the last 30 years both parliament and crown-executive have declined relative to a rise in ‘the rule of law’, ‘human rights’ and judicial activism.
But the poles of this contradiction will only be torn apart if the British state fails at the military or economic level. And/or they will be torn apart if capital actually loses control over the parliamentary mechanism because militant working class opposition to capitalist rule becomes expressed in a communist parliamentary majority or large minority.
If this happens, the basis of the loyalty of the lower levels of the state to the state core and the mechanisms through which capital rules will have to be reconstructed in a way which does not include the ‘democratic’ element. The process will take place in public politics and be extremely visible: a turn of big capital to backing some form of authoritarian policy, whether nationalist or religious, and calling for a military-police or fascist regime.
Because it is a break with the existing state ideology, such a turn will involve massive contradictions for the state. Forcible resistance of the working class to the intended coup may win very broad mass support. It may, indeed, break up the solidarity of the state (the willingness of the grunts to obey orders) and open the road to the overthrow of the state and its replacement by the class power of the working class.
Ultra-leftism
At this point the ultra-leftism of comrade Robinson’s account of the state should become apparent. By characterising parliamentarism as “a sort of Punch and Judy show designed to fool workers” he is actually saying that there is no substantive difference from the point of view of the working class between a parliamentary regime and a fascist or military regime: classic ultra-leftism.
In the JRCL factions, this ultra-leftism produced a strategy of minority violence starting with the campaign against Narita airport in the 1970s, which segued from legitimate self-defence of and solidarity with the peasants who faced expropriation into ordinary leftist minority terrorism - still explicitly defended by JRCL-Chukaku-ha. As the shift from mass action to minority violence developed, the factions also went to war with each other. No doubt state provocateurs played a role in this development, but the underlying minority-violence approach enables manipulation by state provocateurs, as was the case with many other terrorist and semi-terrorist left groups of the 1970s. This war between the factions, rather than the exceptionally repressive nature of the Japanese regime, explains the semi-clandestine character of the JRCL-Kakumaru to which comrade Robinson refers in his article.
In the British far left, the strength of more orthodox Trotskyism, and therefore the circulation of Trotsky’s Struggle against fascism in Germany, has prevented a real shift in this direction, though the idea of ‘crushing fascism in the egg’ by physical force has at times approached the minority-violence perspective. Instead, the effect of ignoring the role of the constitution in the loyalty of state officials and capitalist control of the state has tended to be a rightist refusal to address constitutional questions, an economism in which ‘the struggle’ and getting people on strike or onto the street is all, and propaganda and agitation around the concrete character and form of the state is regarded as an obstacle to this task. Ultra-leftism thus flips into its opportunist opposite.
Fetishism of soviets
Dual power is not our aim, and we are not required to aim for dual power as a necessary stage on the road to the overthrow of capitalist rule. The dual power in the Russian Revolution arose because the working class masses attempted to take power in February 1917, but handed it to the Mensheviks and SRs, who then used it to support the bourgeoisie. If we can defeat our equivalent of the Mensheviks and SRs - the Labour Party and trade union leadership and the ‘official lefts’ - before the outbreak of revolutionary crisis, we will not have to go through dual power.
Comrade Robinson thinks that we can only win through dual power. This is because, he argues, that “it should be emphasised that the only reliable way that mass communist consciousness can be achieved is through the working class creating its own soviets. It is through soviets that a workers’ state machine can be created.”
I have argued at length against this conception in a series on ‘permanent revolution’ last year.8 In retrospect I should have included more of that series in the strategy book than I did. (The series also has more detail on why I think that the policy of Kautsky and the rest of the centre in 1918-21 was a scab policy.) I will not repeat the arguments here, but add only a little to them.
The first is a couple of quotations from Trotsky, which I think express fundamental truths. The first is from Lessons of October (1924): “The young European parties, who have more or less accepted soviets as a ‘doctrine’ and ‘principle,’ always run the danger of treating soviets as a fetish, as some self-sufficing factor in a revolution.”9 Germany itself, and Austria, could provide support for this judgment. There were soviet-type bodies created in the German and Austrian revolutions of 1918-19, the Räte. But the social democrats and centrists retained the political leadership, and as a result the Räte became merely a support for the process of construction of capitalist regimes.
The second is on Spain, in 1931: “We succeeded in creating soviets in Russia only because the demand for them was raised, together with us, by the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries, although, to be sure, they had different aims in mind. We cannot create any soviets in Spain precisely because neither the Socialists nor the syndicalists want soviets. This means that the united front and the organisational unity with the majority of the working class cannot be created under this slogan.”10 Trotsky’s judgment here was confirmed by the later events of the Spanish revolution and civil war: though the workers created militias and in places seized factories, etc, they did not create soviets. What was missing was, as Trotsky said, “a party, a party, and once again a party”.
How could Trotsky argue this if it were true that, as comrade Robinson argues, “the only reliable way that mass communist consciousness can be achieved is through the working class creating its own soviets”?
Comrade Robinson quotes a famous passage from The German ideology: “... for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution.” What is this “communist consciousness”? It is discussed briefly earlier in the passage of The German ideology quoted: the proletariat, the wage-earner class, is “a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class”.11
The “communist consciousness” is therefore merely the consciousness that it is necessary and possible to abolish the existence of classes through the proletariat taking power into its own hands and laying collective hands on the means of production. This consciousness develops in “a practical movement, a revolution”. But should “revolution” here mean merely the brief (in historical time) moment of revolutionary crisis? Or should it mean the rise of the organised workers’ movement, the revolutionary crisis and the overthrow of capitalist rule, and the reconstruction of society under working class rule - the whole taking place over a prolonged period?
It is probable that in 1846 Marx and Engels did indeed mean the brief moment of revolutionary crisis, and that they meant the prolongation of conditions of revolutionary crisis when, in the 1850 address, they say that “the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realisation of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development” and that “Their battle-cry must be: The permanent revolution.”12
However, in their subsequent work in the First International and afterwards, the proletarian revolution quite clearly means the prolonged period of the rise and development of the workers’ movement as well as the short moment of revolutionary crisis and the period of working class rule over a society in transition. Communist consciousness still develops in “a practical movement”: it develops out of the life-experience of the wage-earners and in the form of the creation of trade unions, cooperatives, workers’ parties and so on. These foreshadow the future cooperative society.
They also develop workers’ class-consciousness and their practical ability to take collective decisions, preparing the ground for the working class to be able to rule: that is, take decisions for the society as a whole.
Which view is right? In fact, the answer is visible before us in recent events. The crisis in Argentina in 2000-01 did not pose the question of workers’ power because of the political weakness of the workers’ movement. The current crisis in Thailand does not pose the question of workers’ power, for exactly the same reason. Revolutionary crisis of the state, in the absence of a strong workers’ movement and development of workers’ class-political consciousness, does not pose the question of power, but merely leads to transfers of power among different sections of the capitalist class (or transfer of power from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist class) and forms of reorganisation of the capitalist state.
It is for this reason that fetishisation of soviets as “the only reliable way that mass communist consciousness can be achieved” is inappropriate. Mass communist consciousness develops both in a molecular fashion in the gradual growth of an organised workers’ movement under capitalist rule and in dialectical leaps in a period of crisis. The fetishisation of soviets stresses only the second form of development and in consequence works against the first.
To make this last point is to move onto the terrain of the dialectic. This will be the task of the second part of my response to comrade Robinson.
Notes
1. ‘Succumbing to reformism’, October 30.
2. www.jrcl.org/english/e-ist-upto235.htm; Japan Public Security Intelligence Agency, ‘Focal issues of domestic public security situation in 2007’: www.moj.go.jp/ENGLISH/PSIA/psia03-03.html . The JRCL-Chukaku-ha, naturally, has a similar view of the JRCL-Kakumaru. It blames them for the 1975 assassination of Chukaku-Ha’s general secretary, and includes in its aims that Chukaku-Ha “is determined to achieve a victory over fascist band Kakumaru through accomplishing vengeance upon the assassination of March 14 and carrying through general offensive against them till their complete defeat” (www.zenshin.org/english/the_aims_of_jrcl.htm).
3. J Rees The Algebra of revolution (1998). Compare my review of the book: Weekly Worker September 11 2003.
4. marxists.architexturez.net/history/etol/newspape/isj/index.html
5. There are in fact 2.3 million local government employees: www.ascskills.org/hcms/files/G4-Employers_Organisation_Top_ten_skills_shortage_ areas_2005.pdf . But a considerable number of these, perhaps the majority, are employed in tasks which are not inherently ‘governmental’: for example, teachers.
6. K Marx Capital Vol I, chapter 28: “The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is, of course, still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the ‘natural laws of production’: ie, to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves.” For empirical support against the Gramscian ‘dominant ideology’ thesis see N Abercrombie, S Hill, S Turner The dominant ideology thesis London 1980.
7. The point is well made, albeit for a period before the development of the modern state bureaucracy, by Tim Harris in Revolution Pembroke 2007, pp15-18.
8. Weekly Worker August 4-September 13 2007.
9. L Trotsky Lessons of October (1924) chapter 8: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lessons/ch8.htm (original emphasis). Lessons of October is a problematic work because it overstates the degree to which the political situation in Germany in 1923 approached revolutionary crisis; and understates the responsibility of the Comintern leadership for the failures of the KPD and tries to cast all the blame for decisions to which Trotsky was party onto his opponents in the then current stage of the factional struggle in Russia. On Germany, see A Thalheimer, ‘A missed opportunity?’ and Mike Jones’s introduction, trotsky.org/archive/thalheimer/works/missed/index.htm; on the Russian factional context, R Day, Leon Trotsky and the politics of economic isolation Cambridge 2004, pp105-06. This does not, however, alter the value of the general point made here.
10. L Trotsky, ‘On the slogan of Soviets’ (1931): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/spain/spain09.htm
11. K Marx, F Engels The German ideology London 1974, p94.
12. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm