Letters

Own hands

Whether you like it or not, the euro is in meltdown. Now whether imperialism is dominant isn’t the issue per se, because imperialism will be dominant until capitalism is overthrown globally. One doesn’t put the cart before the horse.

We can’t expect the world revolution to solve our immediate problems without raising concrete demands - not philosophical abstentionism, which is the professional stock trade of every Stalinist huckster. There is escape from imperialism and, with its land seizures of white-owned farms, Zimbabwe has shown that it has taken its destiny into its own hands and very soon it is going to take over white-owned mines.

Greece has to follow the Argentinian path of restoring its currency as a first step and cancelling all foreign debts overnight. This is what the situation demands now and all those who don’t demand it want foreign creditors paid - ie, imperialism.

The fact is - and this is undisputable - that the organised forces of the Greek left (KKE and Syriza) are acting as props to the International Monetary Fund-European Union junta. They march workers like Humpty Dumpty up to the wall only to march them down again. They have no solution to the crisis other than repeating stereotypes about capitalist boom and bust and, whether in the EU or out of it, imperialism dominates. Despite the numbers on all the general strikes and demos, they have been unable to stop any measures. When the masses act on their own and stay on the streets, the left will probably re-emerge in their classic role as ministers of some coalition government, as they did in 1989.

But today there is a big class difference. The crisis ain’t going on vacation. Club Med is bust. So is the euro. So is the left. What comes next will be determined by living social forces. This ain’t a rerun of the 1930s. It will be much worse.

Own hands
Own hands

Sexist clichés

Dave Douglass’s response (Letters, June 17) to my letter (June 10) sadly uses the very clichés that I pointed out in the first place.

The labelling of arguments specifically in the interests of working class women as middle class diversions from the class struggle was already a well-worn rhetorical device when Harry Quelch and Hubert Bax of the Social Democratic Federation used it against the suffragettes. The tactic culminated in the defeat of George Lansbury, who stood on a pro-suffrage platform and who East End dockers, therefore, did not support. The Tory candidate was duly elected. Loving your work, comrades.

Turning to the case of two 10-year-old boys found guilty of the attempted rape of an eight-year-old girl, I find it disturbing that so many of your contributors are so keen to defend the predatory sexual behaviour of men and boys, and are prepared to stoop to the level of the most reactionary elements to do so - eg, ‘she changed her story’, ‘they believed that she had consented’. Why no mention of provocative clothes? Richard Littlejohn, your work here is done.

Close reading of my original letter will show that I said the state’s response to sexual violence is inadequate. It does not follow that I support the tired libertarianism too often espoused by contributors to this paper. The analysis of gender and sexuality expressed is woefully undeveloped and inevitably results in the careless reliance on unchallenged sexism and homophobia.

Sexist clichés
Sexist clichés

Budget attacks

In the June 22 ‘emergency budget’, chancellor George Osborne claimed that everybody would have to take some of the pain, but the rich would take a bigger share of the burden than the poor. Indeed, the ‘red book’ gives figures for 2012-13 which purport to support this claim, but this is before most of the welfare cuts kick in and before child tax credits to the lowest paid are withdrawn. He’s giving big handouts to business, and even the ‘attacks’ on the rich are more designed for public relations purposes than to raise revenue. The bank levy will raise a mere £2.4 billion.

The hard questions have been kicked into the long grass - the autumn pensions review, where the coalition government’s committee chaired by Labour’s John Hutton will report on how to massively cut the cost of public sector pensions in September. There will be a spending review report-back in October, which is when we’ll get some idea what these 25% worth of cuts will be. That will be when the shit really does hit the fan.

Budget attacks
Budget attacks

Transitional

Trotsky “advances a battle plan for the proletariat - made conscious of its historic tasks with the assistance of a revolutionary party - to reconstruct society along fundamentally different (ie, socialist) lines”, explains Hape Breitman of the International Bolshevik Tendency (Letters, June 17).

This is the stale old argument that socialist consciousness will develop out of the struggle for reforms within capitalism, so when workers realise they can’t get the reforms they have been campaigning for they will turn to the ‘cadres’ of the Fourth International for leadership. The fact that it never happens and all that is achieved is the encouragement of reformist illusions amongst workers and disillusionment with the possibility of real radical change is totally missed by Breitman.

His case (and Trotsky’s) can be summed up in the following: the working class has a reformist consciousness; it is the duty of the revolutionary party to be where the masses are; and, therefore, to be with the mass of the working class, we must advocate reforms. Furthermore, the working class is only reformist-minded; winning reformist battles will give the working class confidence so that they will go on to have a socialist revolution.

Thus, the working class will learn from its struggles, and will eventually come to realise that assuming power is the only way to meet its ends; the working class will realise, through the failure of reforms to meet its needs, the futility of reformism and capitalism, and will overthrow it; and the working class will come to trust the party that leads them to victory and, come a social crisis, they will follow it to revolution.

It all relies upon a notion of the inherently revolutionary nature of the working class and that, through the class struggle, this inherently revolutionary character will show itself - although it hasn’t yet. It is also flawed because it shows no reason why, due to the failure of reform, the workers should turn to socialism. Why, since it was people calling themselves socialists who advocated the reforms, should they too become socialists and not turn against the idea, instead?

Moreover, under Trotsky’s model of revolution, the only way the working class could come to socialist consciousness is through a revolution if made by the minority with themselves as its leaders. This explains about needing to be where the mass of the working class is. It is why a supposedly revolutionary party should be with the masses, rather than trying to get the masses to change their minds and be with it. They do not want workers to change their minds, merely to become followers. The efforts of parties like the IBT are not geared towards changing minds or raising revolutionary class-consciousness.

To remain socialist, a party must seek support solely on the basis of a socialist programme. History showed the fate of the social democratic parties, which, despite a formal commitment to socialism as an ‘ultimate goal’, admitted non-socialists to their ranks and sought non-socialist support for a reform programme of capitalism rather than a socialist programme. In order to maintain their non-socialist support, they were forced to drop all talk of socialism and become even more openly reformist.

Transitional
Transitional

No bridge

Hape Breitman criticises Tina Becker for her description of Trotsky’s Transitional programme (‘Danger of honest opportunism’, June 3). But Becker’s description is correct.

Hape believes that the TP is only reformist in the hands of those revolutionaries who wish to apply it in that way. This is wrong. Tina is right to point precisely to the historical setting in which the Transitional programme is located, or, more importantly, the setting that Trotsky and his comrades believed themselves to be in.

Tina is right that outside that setting - which is essentially a near revolutionary situation - the demands in the Transitional programme are, at best, nothing more than reforms and, at worst, meaningless or even reactionary. The whole point was that, under those revolutionary conditions, a working class mobilised to fight for these demands would move from simple reforms to a confrontation with the state itself. But it should be obvious from that perspective alone that in order for that to be the case the working class itself has already to be at a high state of mobilisation and class-consciousness. Taken on their own, the demands of the Transitional programme are indeed nothing more than reforms, which have more or less probability of being won, depending upon the situation. In Italy, the scala mobile was a sliding scale of wages that existed for years without moving the class-consciousness of Italian workers forward one jot. The same was true of the sliding scale of wages introduced by the Tory Heath government in Britain during the 1970s.

Take what Trotsky says himself about the demand in the Transitional programme for the nationalisation of the banks: “However, the statisation of the banks will produce these favourable results only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers.”

But, as I said, this implies that before raising this demand there is a realistic prospect of workers at least struggling to seize power - ie, a revolutionary situation. We are clearly far from such a situation today and so raising such demands is at best reformist, and at worst utopian and reactionary. It essentially means, for example, at the moment giving left cover to the actions of the bourgeois state when they do carry out such nationalisation in the interests of capital.

Similarly, speaking of workers’ control, Trotsky writes: “To break the resistance of the exploiters, the mass pressure of the proletariat is necessary.” Again he is writing about conditions under which he believes that such mass pressure is a realistic prospect, not simply a pipe dream that will be somehow magically summoned up as a result of chanting a mantra of demands.

The same can be said about the workers’ government. Who today would comprise this workers’ government? Would it be New Labour? Would it be John McDonnell and Diane Abbott? Are there sufficient numbers even of ‘left’ MPs to comprise such a government? Or is this workers’ government somehow going to arise again magically by raising transitional demands in the correct order? Will it be made up of representatives of the left sects? In that case, they would need to show they can win more support from the workers than the 75 votes achieved by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the recent general election!

No, the task of Marxists is not to simply treat old documents like the Transitional programme as though they were sacred texts, but to use the method of Marx and Engels to understand the historical conditions we live in today, and to develop our programme and tactics accordingly. In 1938, Trotsky believed that capitalism was in its death agony, hence the Transitional programme. He was wrong. Capitalism is even less in its death agony today, and the revolutionary forces of the working class are much, much weaker than they were in 1938. Trying to apply the failed perspectives of that period today is ridiculous.

Transitional demands were described as being like a bridge that leads the working class from the reformist demands of the minimum programme to the revolutionary perspective of the maximum programme. The problem is that a bridge is only of use if there is a road to that bridge. Today not only is there no road to the bridge, but there is not even a path to a road to the bridge.

No bridge
No bridge