27.11.2008

Seven key points

Bob Potter outlines what he considers the most essential components of Mike Macnair's book

Obviously Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary strategy - Marxism and the challenge of left unity is intended as a discussion document. To my mind he has brilliantly identified the essential questions that must be explored more deeply by today’s revolutionary activists, has concisely provided essential material on the historical roots of these issues and has arguably provided the most important piece of revolutionary literature of the last decade. It deserves wide circulation.

The book’s 170 pages are largely aimed at new and/or possible recruits to the revolutionary movement, providing a well documented account of the development of communist/socialist movements since the days of Marx and Bakunin; the text is heavily loaded with apposite quotations and references, yet without at any time marring the simplicity and clarity of the ideas expounded. Throughout this splendid piece of work, readers are actively discouraged from taking Mike Macnair at his word; rather persuaded to study prime sources for themselves.

Although the work may be aimed at newcomers, there must be many readers, like myself, who have been floating around the revolutionary movement for half a century, kidding themselves they ‘know it all’ and don’t need to read again the earlier original texts - material we argued about in the 1950s and before! They will have the rewarding experience of discovering their past omissions and will be alerted to the multitude of cobwebs accumulated in their brains.

Mike Macnair’s essential message is the need for a new party; a need requiring action in two key dimensions:

1. The need for a new revolutionary international organisation or party - a body created from the intellectual understanding of working people, who understand its need as an instrument for the achievement of human freedom. Without the active creativity of the working class, this organisation cannot come into existence - to state the obvious, it is not something that can generate from the minds of an ‘enlightened’ elite. The new international party must, by definition, prefigure the ‘new’ society to be created.

2. The prime task facing revolutionaries today is the preparation, creation and building of that revolutionary organisation, or party.

Writing these two paragraphs made me very conscious of the difficulties many old-timers (like me) have with terminology. After decades of traditional politics, especially Stalinist politics, words such as ‘vanguard’ and ‘party’ leave a bitter taste on the palate; it is a problem of which we need always be aware. Although I have not held membership in any party since resigning from the CPGB (along with my entire branch!) early in 1957, I have remained a libertarian socialist and been actively involved in many working class struggles.

I have no intention of providing a summary of the text (it is a small book - buy it and read it for yourself!), but here are seven points, discussed or implied, which, in my opinion, should help start the many necessary discussions provoked by careful readings of Revolutionary strategy.

• The working class includes the whole class - employed and unemployed, men, women and children - all who are dependent “on the wage fund” (p32), as defined by Marx in Capital. In capitalist society, the working class forms the majority of the population - hence in capitalist society, the proletarian revolution is, by definition, the self-emancipation of the majority (a problem for the Bolsheviks was that the peasantry formed the majority in Russia).
• A central theme underlying the writings of Marx is the focus on human freedom. My favourite definition of socialism comes from the 1844 manuscripts: socialism is “man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the annulment of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the annulment of private property, through communism” (K Marx Economic and philosophic manuscripts Moscow 1961, p114). It follows from this, as Macnair insists, that “the socialist revolution is necessarily the act of the majority” (p54).
• “The ‘party regime’ must inevitably be the image of the sort of regime we are fighting for” (p47). This is a crucial area over which, since the days of Marx and Bakunin, Marxists and anarchists have frequently fallen out, essential differences between them often revolving around questions of democracy in practice, especially within the revolutionary organisation. As well as referring to positive contributions from anarchists (pp105, 116), Macnair reports (accurately) the recognition of many anarchists that a revolutionary authority does not necessarily take the form of a Stalinist dictatorship, and should become a viable means for collective decision making (p46).

The party must stand for the independent interests of the working class and hence remain independent of capitalist state structures. Bearing in mind that the party needs, in every respect, to prefigure the socialist society we wish to build, the building of this party is, in every sense, part of the process of constructing the future socialist society. Not only complete freedom of speech (and the right to participate in internal factions), complete freedom of information (bureaucratic power is largely based on access to privileged information), elected and recallable officials at all levels throughout society (p164).

These stipulations and guidelines relating to the new party are not presented as desirable but optional extras; those perceiving them as idealistic daydreams or pie in the sky indicate their fundamental disbelief in humanity’s capability of constructing a socialist society.

• The party must be an international party: “The nation-state is merely a firm within the international capitalist system” (p166). The world bourgeoisie maintains itself in power by playing one nation of workers against the others. The ‘socialism in one country’ perspective of the Stalin days belongs in history’s dustbin - no country can stand alone against world imperialism. There is a good introduction to revolutionary defeatism in time of war (pp70-73) and the lessons we must learn from the history of the Internationals is nicely summarised.(pp154-55).
• Historically, the text considers the role (or non-role!) of the soviets during and immediately after the 1917 revolution (pp116-17), highlighting differences between what should have happened (in theory) and what did happen (in practice) - concluding that “institutional forms which will make authority answerable to the masses needs to be addressed in some way other than fetishism of the mass strike and the workers councils” (p50).
• The permanently reactionary nature of popular frontism, in whatever form it takes, receives considerable attention from Macnair. The participation of an individual or a party in a coalition, at any level, to achieve reforms assumes, by definition, state intervention and thereby strengthens the state apparatus - nationally, as participation in the management of the nation-state against the global competition; locally, collaborating with the petty tyrannies in social services (see p55). The self-emancipation of the working class and of society as a whole is possible only by collective ownership and management of the means of production - as Mike points out, “this does not mean state ownership, which is merely a legal form” (p162).
• “The present task of communists/socialists is … not to fight for an alternative government. It is to fight to build an alternative opposition; one which commits itself unambiguously to self-emancipation of the working class through extreme democracy, as opposed to all the loyalist parties” (p 130).

The second bullet point above refers to an important Marxian theme not specifically discussed by Mike Macnair; I inserted this paragraph, as it underlies most of the requisites for initiating the process of laying the foundations for a new party and I had, in the meantime, already read the “comradely criticism” of the book, written by John Robinson (‘Succumbing to reformism’, October 30).

Unfortunately, due to differences in circulation, more people will read Robinson than will see the book. That is unfortunate, for hopefully most readers of both texts will gasp at Robinson’s failure to comprehend what Macnair is saying regarding the Soviet experience.

John Robinson gives us his version of ‘Marxist philosophy’; this is the only bit of his response which I wish to comment upon. Via a quotation from Trotsky’s In defence of Marxism, we are told: “Scientific socialism (Marxism) is the conscious expression of the unconscious historical process; namely, the instinctive and elemental drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings.” Robinson adds that “unconscious historical processes” must “include the struggles of the working class, which result in the creation of soviets and dual power situations. What is important here is that when the working class creates soviets and dual power situations it does so without realising the significance of what it has done. Also that it has objectively raised the question of state power. It must be a central aspect of Marxist philosophy that the working class acts first and thinks about what it has done afterwards” (my emphasis).

John Robinson has been a ‘Marxist’ for a very long time; a political and family friend and associate of the late (and unlamented!) Gerry Healy, he acted as private psychology tutor to the Healy offspring - which, as the above quotation shows, has not changed since he learned Pavlovian behaviourism as an undergraduate. Note the fundamentally unMarxist philosophy he spouts.

Rather than portraying the Marx we know, one of the pioneers to describe the alienation - that essential feature of capitalism - which reduces individuals to artefacts in the productive process; rather than seeing Marx as advocating a philosophy of liberation, seeing the working class as self-liberating (no outside forces will bring about their salvation), advancing to “man’s positive self-consciousness”, Robinson portrays us as robots, entering struggles, even creating workers’ councils and soviets (the fetish Robinson accepts as the only way forward), not knowing what they are doing.

Robinson’s ‘Marxism’ appears strikingly at variance with the Marx’s who penned Capital: “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this: that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at the commencement” (K Marx Capital Vol 1, chapter 7, section 1).