08.09.2010

Goldilocks and the communist programme

In an opening article, Jack Conrad picks out and assesses various criticisms of and alternatives to the CPGB's Draft programme

When it comes to electoral common sense, mainstream bourgeois politics has long had a junkie-like dependence on the advertising industry. Combine that with straitjacketed local government, anti-trade union laws, the collapse of ‘official communism’ and postmodernist dumbing down and you have New Labour. Blairism surely provides the quintessential example of form conquering content. With every reason, Peter York, chairman of the management consultancy agency, SRU, boasts of a “total penetration of establishment thinking and language.”^[1]

Yes, they fool most of the people most of the time. Universal suffrage under capitalism relies on that well honed ability of the political class and the blurring, blinkering, topsy-turvy ideological role of what Marxists call commodity fetishism (the state education system, the mass media and the labour bureaucracy also serve to normalise the workings of capitalism).

By way of contrast, our Draft programme shuns all trite phrases, all crawling before the Murdoch media, all chasing after opinion polls, all attempts to reconcile the working class with capitalism. Our programme does not begin by seeking popularity and then arrive at principles. On the contrary, we begin with the firmest principles and seek to win the masses to them.

The CPGB’s Draft programme consists of six distinct but logically connected sections. To recapitulate: the first outlines the main features of the epoch, the transition from capitalism to communism. Then comes the nature of capitalism in Britain. Following on from this comes what is known as the minimum, or immediate, programme. Next the various classes and strata that exist in Britain and our assessment of, and attitude towards, them. Then comes the section dealing with working class rule. After that the maximum programme and full communism. Finally the need for all partisans of the working class to unite in a single Communist Party.

In the case of the minimum programme, section three in our draft, that means principles, strategic aims and a series of specific demands which the CPGB fights for under capitalism (and which, as shown in section four, a CPGB government would enact in full so as to rapidly move forward).

With the maximum programme, section five, we describe global communism, the withering away of the state and universal freedom.^[2] A return to our original revolutionary human condition, but on a higher material level, where nature itself is at last mastered (in other words, the metabolic rift with nature is ended and nature’s laws learnt).

This transformation of all existing social conditions, the realisation of what Karl Marx called our species-being, is what our programme is designed to achieve, and why in the realm of unfreedom we must organise a mass, democratic-centralist CPGB and why, even as things stand today, CPGB members exhibit such tremendous levels of self-sacrifice, work endless hours without any expectation of praise or reward and why they combine this with a confident, patient, revolutionary optimism.

Trotsky’s ghost

Strangely, there are those, who as a point of honour, denounce this neat, logical and easy to grasp structural arrangement. That despite the fact that Marx and Engels and the 2nd International, when it was Marxist, employed the minimum-maximum arrangement as an unproblematic paradigm. Ditto, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and its Bolshevik faction, of course.

Objections, spluttering or otherwise, are usually raised in the name of Leon Trotsky and his 1938 Transitional programme. These comrades memorise and faithfully repeat a few, carefully culled, quotes from Trotsky. Nevertheless, in practice, they arrive at and advocate a brittle political schema which closely resembles, almost mirrors, the utopian conspiratorialism of Mikhail Bakunin and his brand of anarchism. Eg, whereas we put the extension of democracy at the heart of our programme, far too many comrades on the revolutionary left dismiss democracy: it is variously described as more or less fully achieved, unimportant or a dastardly bourgeois trick.

The expectation is that a narrowly defined revolutionary sect - their own - will be catapulted into the citadels of power by guiding, manoeuvring, bamboozling, stampeding the working class into an apocalyptic fight for a set of rising, but essentially limited, economic demands. Spontaneity is emphasised. Consciousness ignored or downplayed.

Hence, these critics not only do a disservice to Trotsky, the 1917 Bolshevik convert and surely the most outstanding opponent of Stalinism till his death in 1940. Present-day advocates of the Transitional programme obviously deviate from orthodox Marxism and embrace significant aspects of anarchism, but have done so with few if any of Trotsky’s 1938 excuses.^[3] The endless fragmentation, leadership dictatorships, dull scholasticism, circular activism and crass economism needs no further discussion here.

Time

Not that communists fail to take economic questions seriously. Section three of our Draft programme contains demands for wage workers under capitalism that if implemented would transform the lives of millions. Unfortunately our Nick Rogers is not satisfied. The comrade complains, despite positing nothing specific by way of an alternative, that not a few of our economic demands are “excessively modest”.

Eg, though surely not in the spirit of accepting nothing less than the impossible, he lambastes the Draft programme when it comes to working hours. The comrade protests that we merely propose to extend “the best of existing conditions” to the “whole working class”. Being excessively generous to the bourgeoisie, at least in my opinion, comrade Rogers maintains that what we propose is “already statutory right in France”.^[4]

Not least to illustrate our method in formulating the minimum section of our programme, let us discuss the first demand contained in section 3.4 in light of his criticism of our supposed excessive moderation.

This is how it reads in full: “A maximum five-day working week and a maximum seven-hour day for all wage workers. Reduction of that to a four-day working week and a maximum six-hour day for occupations which are dangerous or particularly demanding. The working day must include rest periods of no less than two hours.”

So, instead of the trade union bureaucracy’s ‘light bulb’ “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s pay” slogan, or the United Nations equally empty “reasonable limitation of working hours” (‘Universal declaration of human rights’, article 24), communists envisage mobilising the working class around a set of concrete demands in the tradition of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Internationals and the great eight-hour day movement.

Here, at this point, Karl Marx himself can usefully be consulted. Towards the end of his forensic examination of the working day in Capital, he famously argued that “labourers must put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death.” Marx tellingly called this proposal a “modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day.”^[5] The basic idea being simple: making crystal clear when the time which a worker sells their ability to labour is at an end, and when their own time begins.

But, given present socio-economic circumstances is the demand for a 35-hour week maximum “excessively modest”? First, let me dispose of France. In 2004 the country’s national assembly voted to end the much envied 35-hour week for all practical purposes. Workers in France can now notch up 48 hours weekly through overtime “if they so wish”. By “voluntary contract with capital” many do exactly that.

What of the United Kingdom? According to the Federation of European Employers, full-time workers in the UK average 42.1 hours a week (anyone doing over 35 hours is defined as full-time).^[6] However, that does not include tea, lunch, exercise or other such breaks as paid working time.^[7] As I understand it, UK law allows for a mere 20-minute break (which can be paid or unpaid) if an employee is expected to put in six hours or more at a stretch. And, as we are all surely aware, workers, especially in call centres, banks, offices, etc, are routinely eating on the job, as the intensity of exploitation is endlessly ratcheted up. ‘Grazing’ in common parlance.

The legal maximum workers can be “forced” to work - a give-away UK governmental phrase - is 48 hours. Beyond this threshold there must be a “voluntary agreement” between employee and employer. In 1993 John Major obtained his shameful opt-out from the European Union’s 48-hour limit. And, whatever the law may say, a great number of workers have absolutely no choice in the matter. They are compelled to work, work and work because of the never satisfied greed of their employers for surplus labour. It is that or face the sack and life on the dole. The Health and Safety Executive reports that long hours result in chronic stress, extra workplace accidents, family breakdown and numerous psychological disorders.^[8]

Against this background, yes, perhaps it is true that our own “modest Magna Charta” proposes to extend “the best of existing conditions” to the “whole working class”. But I make no apology for that. Leave aside our four-day week for particularly difficult or dangerous work: I may be wrong, but I know of no industry where workers have secured a maximum 35-hour week - which includes paid rest and recreation periods that add up to 10 hours. But if there is such an industry where workers have made such a gratifying advance their example should be vigorously promoted, made into a benchmark, which workers in other sectors should be encouraged to emulate.

More’s the pity, as a collective we have a long way to go. Eg, full-time teachers in the UK work an average of 51.5 hours.^[9] And, it needs to be stressed, we are talking about a maximum limit of 35 hours. Not generalising a 35-hour week. Communist trade union militants will doubtless be amongst the best fighters for winning reduced hours at higher rates of pay.

Clearly, there is a huge discrepancy between the best existing conditions and the worst (including the discrepancy between France and the UK). Though, as argued above, we should not exaggerate the existing best. So I would prefer to put things this way: our Draft programme seeks to improve the best conditions and raise the whole of the working class up to that level.

Stalinist

Any two-bit phrasemonger can conjure out of thin air the most fabulous demands. Demands which to the naive, to the inexperienced, to the impatient appear far more radical than ours. Not a 35-hour maximum, but, say, a 25-hour or 15-hour maximum week. Indeed one could easily go further, much further, and propose a Baldrick-like ‘cunning plan’ which abolishes capitalist exploitation at a legislative stroke. Eg, introducing the Labour Party’s 1918 constitutional pledge to secure for the workers the “full fruits of their industry … and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”.

A sadly muddled nonsense, directly borrowed from the German Lassalleans by Sidney Webb, who was responsible for drafting the Labour Party’s constitution, including, of course, its famous clause four quoted above.

Marx savaged all such woolly formulations in his Critique of the Gotha programme. “Equitable distribution” might encapsulate what socialism is all about for some innocents, but it is open to the most varied interpretation. Do those who refuse to work get the same as those who work? Do those who labour for five hours a week get the same a those who labour for 35 hours? Is skilled labour to be distinguished from unskilled labour? What about “full fruits”? It completely overlooks the necessity for replacing “used up” means of production, investment in order to “expand production”, putting reserves aside in case of “accidents” and “disturbances” caused by unexpected natural events, “general costs of administration”, providing for “schools, health services”, taking care of the elderly and those “unable to work”, etc.^[10]

However, in service of a barely concealed Stalinism Paul Cockshott recommends the Labour Party’s old clause four and amazingly, without so much as a blush, even claims that it “gives a clearer and more accurate summary of Marx’s economic aims” than the CPGB’s Draft programme. It is impossible to treat this self-evident quackery seriously. Sorry to say, the same goes for most of the comrade’s other arguments.

Naturally comrade Cockshott’s socialist models include the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, China, etc. Nonetheless, it ought to be understood that his is a highly unorthodox, not to say eccentric, Stalinism. So, while comrade Cockshott is minded to maintain elements of the market in his version of socialism - eg, for consumer goods - this is combined with introducing a system of choosing legislators by lot and labour tokens.

Well-meaning, I am more than prepared to grant, but, when it comes down to it, what the comrade proposes is a Stalinism with an Athenian face. Delusional, unachievable, or completely disastrous, in the real world, but in the here and now it does provide him with a high horse from which he can call left what is rightwing and call rightwing what is left.

So, because we characterise as “objectively reactionary” proposals for “wholesale nationalisation” under capitalism, comrade Cockshott concludes that our Draft programme is “less radical” than Old Labour’s clause four (and, as one might expect, the ‘official communists’ in 20th century Europe).^[11] As if Labour ever stood for making trade unions into schools for communism, advocated the free movement of people, opposed all imperialist wars or aspired to establish a workers’ militia and abolish the monarchy, let alone fought to bring about universal human liberation.

It ought to be emphasised that the CPGB is committed to the immediate nationalisation of “land, banks and financial services, along with basic infrastructure, such as public transport, electricity, gas and water supplies”. What economists call natural monopolies.

Sadly, behaving like the worst kind of pedant, comrade Cockshott plays a tiresome game. Because we do not include the NHS “as something that should be nationalised, they [that is, us in the CPGB] must favour privatisation”. Preposterous, but that is how he reasons. Absence segues into a must. A literary slight of hand that doubtless pleases clever comrade Cockshott no end. But performing such polemical tricks just wastes the time of the reader and insults their intelligence. No one is deceived. No one is impressed. We can all see what he is up to. The undeniable fact of the matter is that “land, banks and financial services, along with basic infrastructure, such as public transport, electricity, gas and water supplies” are today either totally or partially in the hands of private capital. To state another undeniable fact, the NHS is not. It is funded from general taxation and is politically accountable to various health ministers. To call for the nationalisation of the NHS would therefore be strange indeed.

True, under capitalism the CPGB is less concerned with an extension of state control, say to the “top 150 companies and banks that dominate the British economy”. No, we are more concerned with the extension of working class control over all aspects of social life. Hence our stress on democracy. And that applies not only to the political sphere, but the economic too. We certainly want workers to assume a position whereby they can successfully challenge the right of management to manage. Whether that be management in a state-owned or privately owned concern is for us a secondary question.

Yet, trammelled by nationalisation as his main yardstick of judging social progress, comrade Cockshott characterises our Draft programme as being situated politically in a position “historically occupied by the centre-right of the Labour Party”. After all, the Labour governments of Attlee and Wilson nationalised coalmining, the railways, electricity generation, gas supplies and steel ... the CPGB only wants to add “land, banks and financial services” to that list. Like our comrade Rogers, it is no surprise, therefore, that comrade Cockshott feels justified in describing our “economic goals” as “very modest”.

True, old Labour talked leftish when it suited - eg, after the October Revolution in Russia. Meanwhile it loyally served capitalism both in opposition and government. But even if its leftish talk was miraculously transformed into legislative action, what would have been the result? Not socialism and thus the rule of the working class. No, there would have been a state capitalism and the continuation of the oppressed social position of workers as a slave class. Something which genuine Marxists reject outright.

Is comrade Cockshott’s alternating dismissal of our Draft programme as centre-right Labourism and praise for the ‘Marxist’ clause four open to rational political explanation? I believe it is. We are not dealing with a split personality. Comrade Cockshott’s background lies in the - pro-Stalin, pro-imperialist, pro-loyalist, pro-Falklands war, pro-Khmer Rouge and anti- the miners’ 1984-85 Great Strike - British and Irish Communist Organisation. I have neither the time nor the inclination to trace the dreadful history of this dreadful offshoot of Maoism. But, beginning with a fawning admiration for Mao and Stalin, BICO ended with a fawning admiration for rightwing British Labourism without fundamentally changing theoretically.

BICO officially no longer exists. Nevertheless, one of its numerous successor organisations is the Ernest Bevin Society. Ernest Bevin (1881-1951) being a particularly vile rightwing trade union bureaucrat, Labour minister and cold war warrior. I know not whether comrade Cockshott has ever had organisational relations with the Ernest Bevin Society. But spiritually and intellectually he remains with BICO. To coin a phrase, ‘You can take Paul Cockshott out of BICO but you cannot take BICO out of Paul Cockshott’.

Class

Communists are materialists. Not utopians. We base our immediate demands on existing social relations, existing cultural levels and existing technical possibilities. Capitalism cannot be superseded by decree. Nor can the state, the division of labour or necessary labour. As Marx points out, although working time is not fixed, but changeable in quantity, “it can, on the other hand, only vary within certain limits”.^[12] Even if we abolished capitalist exploitation: work has to be performed if workers are to maintain themselves and their families and if society at large is to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, kept warm and culturally reproduced.

Nor can class relations be left out of our calculations. The CPGB’s Draft programme is quite clear: huge advantages will be gained if the working class manages to neutralise small and medium-sized capitalists and win over the middle classes as allies. But pursuing this strategy has limits. Eg, the interests of small and medium-sized capitalists should be defended by the working class “in so far as it does not contradict its own interests” (section 4.1).

A legally enforceable maximum 35-hour working week - and all other such economic demands such as maternity leave, trade union rights and openness in business maters - will require a most determined struggle, which will have to be coordinated across the whole planet if capital is not to simply transfer operations from one country to another. Indeed we need to be fully aware that a 35-hour maximum will spell ruin for the weakest sections of capital.

Small and medium-sized capitalists in particular will cry blue murder and resort to desperate measures in order to resist. Egged on by big capital, generously publicised by the mass media, quietly advised and cynically manipulated by the secret state, they could well take to the streets along with their loyal workers, organise damaging lock-outs and even resort to destabilising acts of terror.

While advancing programmatic demands designed to neutralise small and medium capitalists by defending them against big capital, the underlying reasoning of the communists is clear and undeviating. Winning the battle for time is a must. As a collective, workers will doubtless rescue time for their family, friends, sporting, DIY, gardening, artistic and other such relationships, activities and pursuits. However, time is also needed if the working class is to become a political class. Reading theoretical articles, taking up elected positions, studying Capital and other classics, attending communist schools and universities takes time. Time is therefore a vital revolutionary question.

Decline

So we most certainly do not treat capitalism as if it were the natural human condition, or a mode of production that should still be judged as historically “progressive”.^[13] That would be to put off socialism and the struggle to overcome the market, the hierarchical division of labour, wage-slavery and all that outmoded social junk. It would certainly be to disarm ourselves before today’s reality of war, social decay and ecological degradation.

Capitalism has been in “decline” from at least the 1880s; therefore the “main contradiction” in our epoch is constituted by a “malfunctioning capitalism and an overdue socialism”. This statement, contained in our Draft programme, is not based on tracking gross national product, technical innovation, employment or global trade statistics. Transparently useless diagnostically in terms of assessing the health of this system: except for brief, convulsive downturns global capitalism is impossible without a certain level of growth and accumulation. Equally to the point, in Marxist terms, such an approach is obviously superficial. Banal empiricism.

We seek out and highlight essentials - crucially in this context the decline of the law of value. Eg, the much vaunted market of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman is nowadays diminished, dominated and distorted by giant transnational monopolies and, as it fitfully retreats, increasingly relies on massive government support, subsidies and substitution.

Nor do we place any faith in the capitalist state machine. Ours is not a programme for taking hold of current “state bodies” - eg, “the armed forces and security services, the police and judiciary, and the civil and diplomatic services” - and using this overblown bureaucratic monstrosity as the midwife for a British road to Stalinism.^[14] On the contrary, the communist programme openly, boldly, confidently maps out the strategy needed to make the working class into a political party, a political party which breaks apart, smashes capitalism’s oppressive state apparatus and moves, in the shortest time objective circumstances permit, from the decisive salient of Europe, to superseding capitalism on a global scale.

Our programme thereby links everyday struggles with the ultimate goal of communism and full collective and individual human development. Hence, far from counterposing theory and practice, it represents their dialectical unity.

Length

There are two common mistakes we have sought to avoid when it came to writing our Draft programme: Lilliputian coyness and Brobdingnagian prolixity.

The five bullet points of ‘What the Socialist Workers Party stands for’ column, which appears each week in Socialist Worker, is an obvious example of the former. This boxed little excuse is all that its leadership considers safe in the way of publicly promoting a programme. Even then it is shot through with errors. Take the former Soviet Union being “state capitalist” (as if labour-power was a commodity freely bought and sold and the rouble was money laid out in order to extract surplus value). Then there is the working class producing “all wealth” under capitalism (nature and the middle classes being completely forgotten). But the fact of the matter is that the ‘What the SWP stands for’ column is so short, so pinched, so famished, so tokenistic that to all intents and purposes it constitutes a void.

However, for the SWP central committee this has one great advantage. Lilliputian coyness allows the SWP high-ups to perform the most outrageous opportunist flip-flops without the membership being able to raise any programmatic objections. Indeed, treated as mere speaking tools, the SWP’s rank-and-file - those who are active anyway - do what they are told virtually without question. At the leadership’s bidding they even voted down their own ‘principles’ in Respect: eg, international socialism, free movement of labour, republicanism, abortion and secularism.

Then there is Brobdingnagian prolixity. The ‘official’ CPGB’s British road to socialism provides a classic case study. Having first been published in 1951 and formally adopted in 1952, it grew and grew with each new edition as passing political fashions and fads were tagged on and minute detail spawned minute detail. When the Eurocommunists published their valedictory replacement in 1990, the Manifesto for new times, in was not only thoroughly reformist, but 96 pages long.

We have written our Draft programme according to a rough and ready, ‘long as necessary but short as possible’ approach. A seeking after a Goldilocks ideal that hopefully means readability, inspiration and specific demands, but where detailed definitions, explanations, theoretical debate, tactical issues, repetition - everything that is not needed - is ruthlessly excluded.

I say this because inevitably there are comrades who believe they strengthen the Draft programme by proposing additional subjects for inclusion. Some suggestions have been worthwhile, such as incorporating housing and health.^[15] I would favour short passages dealing with such issues. But then there are those who urge upon us this or that particular hobbyhorse, those who want to avoid every possible idiotic misinterpretation and those who for purely factional purposes woefully refuse to understand what we are saying.

Giving way to such diversions would only weaken our Draft programme. We shall explain, answer, elaborate and refute in the Weekly Worker and elsewhere.

Notes

1. Financial Times August 28-2 9 2010.
2. ‘Third programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain’ Weekly Worker February 11 2010.
3. See my November 16 2006 Weekly Worker article, ‘Programmatic masks and transitional fleas’.
4. Weekly Worker April 8 2010.
5. K Marx Capital Vol 1, London 1970, p302.
6. www.fedee.com/workinghours.shtml
7. www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/hrpract/hoursandholidays/working-hours-time-off.htm
8. www.hse.gov.uk/research/hsl_pdf/2003/hsl03-02.pdf
9. www.atl.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/policies/working-time.asp
10. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, pp84-85.
11. Weekly Worker March 18 2010.
12. K Marx Capital Vol 1, London 1970, p232.
13. www.workersliberty.org/blogs/paulhampton/2010/07/12/i-was-wrong-decline-capitalism
14. www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/brs/2001/06.htm#sps
15. Nick Rogers made these two suggestion in his April 8 2010 Weekly Worker article on the Draft programme.