05.10.2011

Imputed consciousness and left organisations

Andy Wilson was part of a panel of three comrades who addressed the CPGB's Communist University in a session entitled 'They fuck you up, the left'. This is an edited version of his speech

I am an ex-member of the Socialist Workers Party, from which I was expelled in 1994. I then helped form the IS Group - a short-lived organisation that mostly made propaganda directed towards the SWP, critical of its internal regime. More latterly I am a member and founder of the Association of Musical Marxists.

There are plenty of horror stories about the left’s culture, of course - some of those about Gerry Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party are enough to give you a bilious attack: they go far beyond humour. The result is that the left seems to a lot of people to be made up of self-important, puffed-up bullshitters. John Sullivan’s pamphlet, When we leave this pub - his round-up of the different groups of the left, which I see is on sale at a bookstall here - is so funny because much of it is true in terms of the picture it paints of the left’s foibles. I would agree with Simon Pirani’s general proposition that one problem with revolutionary groups is that they are purely political (‘Leninist assumptions and cult hierarchies’, September 29).

People talk about revolutionary consciousness - and this question was connected to my relationship with the SWP and my falling out with them. One question I love asking revolutionaries is, what is this consciousness that you are talking about? What does it consist of? Is it party slogans or agreeing with items in a programme? What is the content and nature of revolutionary consciousness? That is a really important question.

I will come back to that later, but first I will just say a little about my expulsion from the SWP. There is one thing about it that was extremely unpleasant. It is only recently that I found out, for example, the number of hours Tony Cliff put in phoning people, to drag out of them the names of any friends or associates I had, so they could be ‘minded’ as well. I was largely ostracised by people I had known for years - but even to this day I cannot tell you exactly why I was expelled.

Ostensibly it was because I wanted to start an independent cultural magazine, The Assassin, that would involve non-SWP members. This was considered deeply factional. In a sense they were right, because the reason I wanted to write about culture is that I worked out that if you went to an SWP meeting entitled ‘Should the troops get out of Ireland?’, well, we all knew what the answer was. But if you asked, ‘Was Madonna [the pop star] a good thing for women or not?’, you would get 50 different answers from people who all supposedly agreed with each other politically. I found that a really interesting field to explore, because I thought it might allow you to begin to address the real ideas and feelings of people rather than what they had learned by rote from educationals and party meetings. I believed that these latent ideas could be turned against the elements of bureaucratism I found in the party. So in that sense there was indeed a sort of factional intent. Not that this should be grounds for expulsion from a revolutionary group.

But I was told that I was being expelled because the central committee had ordered me not to produce this independent cultural magazine and I had refused to back down. They said an independent publication of that kind could not be allowed within the SWP. I pointed out that such things already existed: for example, there was an independent, socialist, cultural publishing house called Red Words - in fact, one of my accusers, Lindsey German, was involved in running it. She and Tony Cliff told me at my disciplinary hearing that there was an important difference: “If we told them to stop, they would, whereas if we tell you to stop, we feel you will not.”

So I was expelled - for life. I remember asking the control commission: “Don’t you think expelling me for life is an error on the part of the central committee? It places limits on your own powers, because you may want to change your mind at some point in the future. Why don’t you just make it ‘indefinite’?” But they insisted it was ‘for life’ and so it remains in force, since I am still alive - fortunately for me!

Because I do not know exactly why I was expelled, it is very hard for me to put my finger on some of the arguments behind it. Ultimately, it seems, I was expelled for arguing with a layer of the leadership about something connected with the direction of the party, its philosophy and politics. Some people were not prepared to tolerate that, so they put a lot of pressure on me and manoeuvred to get me out.

Lukács

Some of these arguments touched on the nature of revolutionary consciousness - in particular around the philosopher, Georg Lukács, which I debated with John Rees and his supporters over a number of years. I am going to run through them as briefly as I can, but by doing so I am not trying to intimate that solving the problems raised by Lukács, or taking the correct position on them, will somehow enable anybody magically to avoid the kind of dramas we are talking about. Nevertheless they bear on important questions for all of us.

The gist of it is this. In Lukács’s great early work, History and class consciousness, there are two important dimensions. One of them is something that is widely celebrated: Lukács’s application of Marxism in a way that Marx had not directly applied it. Lukács produces a critique of reification connected to a particular form: the commodity nature of production under capitalism. It is the way that ruling ideas assert themselves - and they assert themselves across the whole of society. So you do not have a working class with working class ideas, confronting the ruling class with ruling class ideas, in a direct showdown. What you have is the domination of ruling class ideas.

Now, that aspect of Lukács is tremendously important. Were you to pursue it, you could develop it to explain the way in which ostensibly revolutionary groupings and parties become bureaucratised themselves, and ultimately the way that theory is often turned into an ideology by these groups - and that would be a very useful thing to do.

On the other hand, Lukács is also concerned about the objectivity of our ideas. If ideas are created by reification, how can the working class break through that to achieve something like the truth? The key point, I think, is what Lukács says about reified consciousness: there is also such a thing as an imputed class-consciousness - the consciousness that the working class would have, if it were aware of its objective situation and interests. This imputed class-consciousness is, if you like, the ‘objective truth’ moment of his philosophical system. The really interesting thing is that Lukács says repeatedly in his book that the revolutionary party is the imputed consciousness of the working class. He also says that by this ‘imputed consciousness’ he means the socialist ideas that Lenin, in What is to be done?, says must be injected into the class from without - a formulation which the International Socialists tradition, culminating in the SWP, had always rejected.

This is a philosophical problem which gets at the essence of the culture of left groups. Fascist groups have the Führerprinzip - they must be created according to a hierarchical structure, at the top of which is the Führer. I am not saying that Trotskyist groups have anything like that idea, but what I will say is this: if you have an idea of imputed class-consciousness, which you more or less identify with the revolutionary party, then, wherever the members of the revolutionary party are interacting with the world outside, they are being pulled in a different direction. They are being pulled away from imputed class-consciousness. Sectional interests are defined as antagonistic to this correct class-consciousness.

Things get interesting when you go a little deeper. If the correct, imputed class-consciousness resides in the revolutionary party, and yet the members of the revolutionary party are in fact pulled in different directions by their day-to-day experience, where in the revolutionary party does it actually reside? Well, of course, if the members at the ‘periphery’ of the party - where it makes contact with the world outside, so to say - are being pulled by the class, then the correct consciousness must lie at the point furthest away from this periphery - it must reside at the ‘centre’ of the party. That is why all the groups have their ‘centre’, and ‘centralised’ leaderships.

However, in reality the central committees are also torn apart by ideological differences; by outside allegiances, prejudices, whims - whatever it is that drives these people. Therefore, ultimately possession of the correct consciousness comes down very, very often to one person (though a member of the SWP central committee once confided to me that, in her opinion, only two people in the SWP had the correct revolutionary ‘instincts’ - herself and Tony Cliff). The way that Gerry Healy dominated the WRP, the way that Cliff dominated the SWP, and so on, is perhaps not merely down to their talents or the force of their personalities, but has been prepared by the logic of a particular mindset. So, while there is no Führerprinzip involved, in practice these groups are nevertheless generally dominated by powerful individuals, or powerful cliques.

Unity

A friend of mine who is active in a revolutionary group that shall remain nameless was telling me this week that the word going around the party he belongs to is that he is becoming increasingly cynical. That struck me as very interesting. Cynical about what? Nobody felt the need to say precisely what he was being cynical about: it was just obvious. He was becoming unreliable. The idea that a revolutionary group should be wary of people who are cynical is incredible, because to me cynicism is an important revolutionary virtue.

I have talked about Lukács because that is the way I thought about this problem when my expulsion was taking place. But I think what we are waiting for is a change of circumstances that will allow us an opportunity to start to overcome these distortions. The recent upsurge in militancy should at last focus the attention of the various groups of the left on creating some greater revolutionary unity, and perhaps creating an actual revolutionary working class party, which we certainly do not have at the moment.

However, there is another aspect: knowing your own history as a movement is incredibly important, but in certain circumstances it can become a fetter. I was actually the SWP organiser in Liverpool for a few years, and I engaged at some level with the Militant. My experience of this is that people become embedded in their party positions in a way that precludes the necessary rethinking that is usually needed to make progress. As a young cadre you are taught how to defend your own group; theory almost becomes synonymous with the history of your own group, including its ideological struggles and the conclusions arrived at. You become a loyalist to those positions and therefore hemmed into your own party position.

I said at the beginning that I helped form “the IS Group”. Note that it was not called ‘International Socialists Group’: the name was a nod towards the old IS (International Socialists) that became the SWP. Our idea was that, as the SWP had progressed, it had actually lost something quite valuable that had been in the early IS - its much greater ideological openness. Hungary, what happened in the Communist Party, Khrushchev’s secret speech - in the 1950s all those things created an ideological ferment among small groups on the far left.

Last week I met Ken Weller, who decades ago had been a member of the Communist Party. He later joined the WRP, then helped form Solidarity, which was a sort of anti-Leninist group and became increasingly anarchistic. But in its early days, Solidarity was engaged by Tony Cliff and Mike Kidron in unity talks, with the idea that its members should join the early IS - still the Socialist Review Group at that time. Not only that, but members of Solidarity sat on the editorial board of International Socialism for a while. The point is that things were open-ended - people were genuinely rethinking their own traditions. I do not think that we have seen that for 20 or 30 years in any meaningful sense.

Leaving aside the philosophy and Lukács, I believe it is now becoming increasingly possible for us to talk more meaningfully about unity on the revolutionary left. About building a left that can slough off this awful culture we have inherited. So, despite my carefully nurtured cynicism, I am actually quite optimistic about the possibility of beginning to address some of these issues.