07.02.2013
SWP crisis: Programme and the programmeless
Why do communists place such importance on their programmes and why does the SWP central committee expel oppositionists who advocate developing one? Jack Conrad begins a short series of articles
Socialism is won from below, not delivered from on high. So there is no road to socialism via the bureaucratic state, a socialist sect, trade union officialdom or a charismatic military liberator. Yet, though it may appear paradoxical, the Marxist party is built around a programme top-down.
Does that mean that the Marxist party we envisage - its proper title being ‘Communist Party’ - is going to consist of a few thousand activists directed, controlled and policed by a self-perpetuating central committee or self-appointed guru? No, far from it, and that is why we consider the aims and methods of groups like the Socialist Party in England and Wales, Workers Power and the Socialist Workers Party so problematic.
What we mean when we talk of ‘party’ is the kind of mass organisation fought for by Karl Marx. At the Hague congress of the First International, held in September 1872, he moved a successful resolution which called for workers to form themselves “into a political party”. Otherwise the “working class cannot act as a class”.1
Historically, the most valuable examples of this kind of class party were, of course, the German Social Democratic Party of August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky, and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) led by Vladimir Lenin. Both of these parties sank deep social roots and were characterised by a thoroughgoing internal democracy, the lively, frank and open debate of factional differences, and the autonomy of local branches and districts in their own spheres of operation. However - and this is the point here - these parties were built around their programmes. A fact of the utmost importance, which is hardly lost on those of us who look upon, with a combination of frustration, pity and horror, those comrades whose prime focus, loyalties and hopes lie with Respect, the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, Campaign for a New Workers’ Party and other such halfway-house projects.
Communists aim for nothing short of an explicitly Marxist party, a Communist Party fit for the burning tasks of the 21st century: putting the working class into power and positively superseding the malfunctioning system of capitalism.
Incidentally, it must be stressed that, though there are members of the CPGB, there is no CPGB. The Weekly Worker’s ‘What we fight for’ column says that, while there are “many so-called ‘parties’”, there “exists no real Communist Party”. Another one of those paradoxes that causes endless confusion for those whose understanding is determinedly limited to formal logic.
While necessarily fully taking into account the many changes that have occurred in the capitalist global system in the years since the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe - the social democratisation of ‘official communism’, the death of social democratic reformism, the 2008 banking crisis, the long recession, etc - to succeed in the aim of establishing a Communist Party, we must still put programme at the heart of our struggle.
The basic propositions of Marxism are simple and straightforward: capital’s limitless thirst for surplus value means it has a reckless disregard both for human beings and nature; capitalism is an international system that can only be superseded at a global level; the class struggle poses the necessity of rule by the working class majority; the market must be abolished and replaced by the communist principle of need. These fundamental propositions of Marxism can be grasped by anyone really interested in human liberation.
In 1932, Bertolt Brecht put things like this in his marvellous cabaret song, ‘In praise of communism’:
It’s sensible; anyone can understand it.
It’s easy.
You’re not an exploiter, so you can grasp it.
It’s a good thing for you - find out more about it.
The stupid call it stupid and the squalid call it squalid.
It’s against squalor and against stupidity.
The exploiters call it a crime but we know:
It is the end of crime.
It is not madness, but the end of madness.
It is not the riddle, but the solution.
It is the simplest thing, so hard to achieve.
However, Marxism is rightly spoken of as a science. After all, another term for it is scientific socialism. Marxism richly deserves that title because it has been painstakingly developed and in its own way tested in practice like other sciences. But the wages system of capitalist exploitation, the non-capitalist and non-socialist nature of the Soviet Union, imperialism and monopoly capital, the manufacturing of false consciousness, the production of waste and artificial wants, finance capital and the decline of value, money and the corresponding rise of bureaucracy and organisation are … well, neither “easy” nor the “simplest thing”.
Such phenomena have to be studied, grasped in all their complexity, and the results transmitted with even more energy, verve and imagination than the discoveries of physicists, evolutionary biology and mathematicians. I emphasise the phrase ‘even more’, because Marxism is dedicated not merely to discovering what is: the aim is to completely transform what is. A task which Brecht, once again with characteristic sharpness, called “so hard to achieve”, because it means politically mobilising and organising billions of people to overthrow global capitalism.
While Marx and Engels were undoubtedly geniuses of the first order, they also had to put in endless hours of study (not forgetting their leading role as practical organisers and revolutionaries, which immensely enriched their theory). Like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein, their genius was 99% sweat. It took Marx a lifetime to be able to write Capital (a task he was, in fact, unable to complete - Capital itself being part of a much bigger, multi-volumed project that would encompass “landed property”, “wage-labour”, “the state”, “foreign trade” and the “world market”).2 He had to, and did, penetrate through the outer appearance of the capitalist mode of production, reveal its inner laws of motion and historical tendencies ... and then find a suitable method of presentation.
Purpose and structure
There is nothing superficial, short-termist, quixotic or doctrinaire about the Marxist programme. Neither a little list of unfulfillable Keynesian nostrums: eg, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition’s May 2010 general election manifesto;3 nor a sectarian confession of faith: eg, the Spartacists’ Declaration of principles;4 nor a parliamentary road that has to be constantly updated: eg, the Communist Party of Britain’s Britain’s road to socialism. *
The communist programme draws on the most profound scientific investigations. That does not mean it is a work of ‘pure’ science, readable only by academics and those with PhDs. No, it must become the political compass for many millions. Hence, as we explained some years ago, “Every clause of the programme must be easily assimilated and understood by advanced workers. It must be written in an accessible style, whereby passages and sentences can be used for agitational purposes and even turned into slogans.”5 And the fact of the matter is that the need for the communist programme arises from the needs of the working class itself. Without a clear set of aims, without clear answers to all the big issues, without a clear strategy there can be no hope of defeating global capitalism and achieving socialism, communism and human freedom. Hence the importance which we attach to programme.
So what is the communist programme? For the answer we need look no further than our Draft programme of the CPGB.
Firstly, it is a guide to action: ie, how to go about organising the working class into a political party. Secondly, it presents our aims and principles - aims and principles which are not spun out of thin air, but derived from accumulated theoretical knowledge and the needs and historical experience of the world’s working class.
The programme is thereby the foundation for the Communist Party and links the everyday work of members, both present and future, with the goal of communism. Put another way, the programme is the unity between theory and practice. Hence the programme establishes an agreed line of march and is the standard, the reference point, around which the voluntary unity of communists can be built and concretised. In turn that practice verifies or disproves aspects of the programme.
Of course, the Communist Party - being the advanced part of the working class - formulates, agrees and changes the programme. But in many ways the Communist Party is itself a structure growing from the programme. Recruits are motivated by its inspiring and theoretically established objectives. They are trained and encadred by the struggle to realise its demands. In that sense the programme is responsible for generating the Communist Party. The main determination runs not from the needs of the organisation, but from the programme and its principles to the organisation and its membership.
Our Draft programme is as short and pointed as possible. Everything non-essential was consciously kept out. Passing facts and figures, prime ministers and presidents, demonstrations, opinion polls and episodic alliances have no place in the communist programme. Engels himself urged exactly that approach: “All that is redundant in a programme weakens it.”6
Hence our Draft programme deals with principles and strategy. No place therefore for agitation, news commentary or theoretical and historical explanations: all that we leave to other platforms: trade union meetings, mass demonstrations, articles in the press and on the internet, pamphlets, books, seminars, etc. As we confidently stated in 1991, it should follow that our programme “will therefore not of necessity need rewriting every couple of years, as with the programmes of the opportunists, let alone go out of date even before it has come off the press.”7
In this respect, Lenin too made a highly relevant observation:
The programme should leave questions of means open, allowing the choice of means to the militant organisations and to party congresses that determine the tactics of the party. Questions of tactics, however, can hardly be introduced into the programme (with the exception of the most important questions, questions of principle, such as the attitude to other fighters against the autocracy). Questions of tactics will be discussed by the party newspaper as they arise and will be eventually decided at party congresses.8
So the communist programme fulfils a basic twofold function: aims and strategy. Clearly then, the programme owes nothing to holy script - it is not fixed, timeless and inviolate. On the contrary, given a major political rupture - eg, overthrow of the monarchy constitution, partition of Britain and its workers’ movement by nationalists, establishment of an EU superstate, etc - various aims and demands in the programme ought to be suitably reformulated or new sections introduced.
In terms of its structure, we have sought to learn from the best: eg, in my opinion the Marx-Engels Manifesto of the Communist Party, the Erfurt programme of the German SDP and the first and second programmes of the RSDLP. Of course, we have not mindlessly copied any of them. Obviously, conditions in the United Kingdom and its economic peculiarities, the specifics of its constitution and class structure must be taken into account. Communist parties, it should hardly need saying (but sadly it does in light of the Scottish Socialist Party, Solidarity and the Socialist Party in England and Wales), organise on the basis of the principle of ‘One state, one party’. No petty nationalism for us. Proletarian revolution reaches from the state to the global, not from the state to the national.
Let me outline the structure of the CPGB Draft programme. The form of every Marxist programme is closely connected with content. Our programme therefore has an inner logic. Each section, each statement, each demand logically leads to another.
We divide our programme into six distinct, but connected sections. The opening section is a brief preamble describing the origins of the CPGB and the inspiration provided by the October 1917 revolution. We also rightly touch upon the liquidation of the CPGB by its various opportunist leaderships and conclude with the organised rebellion by the Leninist forces and the subsequent struggle to reforge the party.
The next section, the substantive or real starting point, outlines the main features of the epoch - the epoch of the transition from capitalism, by way of socialism, to communism. Then comes the nature of capitalism in Britain and the consequences of its development. Following on from here are the immediate economic, political and democratic measures that are required if the peoples of Britain are to live a full and decent life. Such a minimum or immediate programme is, admittedly, technically feasible within the confines of present-day capitalism. In actual fact though, human need can only be genuinely realised in its totality by way of revolution.
From these radical foundations the character of the British revolution and the position of the various classes and strata are presented. Next, again logically, comes the workers’ government in Britain and the worldwide transition to socialism and communism. Here is our maximum programme. Finally the necessity for all partisans of the working class to unite in a Communist Party is dealt with. The essential organisational principles of democracy and unity in action are stated and we underline in no uncertain terms why the CPGB must facilitate criticism and the open discussion of differences.
SWP versus Marx
Though communists treat their programmes with the utmost seriousness, talk to any SWP loyalist and I guarantee you they will adopt a completely dismissive, even an aggressively hostile, attitude if you dare suggest that it would be a good idea for the SWP to adopt one. There are, thankfully, SWP oppositionists. Eg, writing in the run-up to the January 2012 conference, Paris Thompson not only proposed that permanent factions should be allowed and political differences “openly acknowledged”. He went on to advocate the “Development of a party programme”. A programme, he argued, would “not only serve to give greater clarity to the party’s strategy, but also to stimulate serious discussion, creating ownership over the party’s direction and politics”.9 Of course, almost exactly a year later comrade Thompson and three other oppositionists found themselves expelled for the crime of not organising a faction.
Anyway, in justifying the SWP’s bizarre aversion to any kind of programme, loyalists typically insist that a programme is rigid, inflexible and constricting; that, in short, a programme is a horrible danger that must be avoided at all costs. To provide themselves with the blessing of ‘orthodoxy’ SWP loyalists will invoke the ghost of Marx. After all, in his covering letter, introducing his Critique of the Gotha programme, written to Wilhelm Bracke in May 1875, Marx famously stated: “Every step of the real movement is more important than a dozen programmes”.10 That quote is meant to clinch the argument. In fact it does no such thing.
Presumably what Marx meant by a “step of the real movement” was an historic event on the scale of the 1848 revolutions, the American civil war or Paris Commune (it had happened just four years previously). I doubt he had in mind something like the claimed “1,000-strong” Unite the Resistance rally in November 2012 (in fact, there were 700 people present, 75% of whom were SWP members). Nor, I suspect, did he have in mind something like Walthamstow council’s decision to ban the English Defence League from marching in October 2012. Both events being deemed “very successful” by the SWP’s beleaguered central committee and pitiably used to boost its “interventionist” credentials in the run-up to the 2013 conference.
No, far from batting aside the need for a programme - and this is obvious with even a cursory reading of his Critique - Marx was attempting to correct, to reorientate, the proto-SDP programmatically. Needless to say, he fully appreciated the role and importance of programme - after all, he authored the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, to name just two, and had a hand in others (eg, the 1880 Programme of the Parti Ouvrier). Because of the seriousness he attached to the draft Gotha programme, disobeying doctor’s orders, he took to his desk to compose what were furious criticisms.
Put together jointly by Marx’s comrades, the Eisenachers - notably Bebel and Liebknecht - and the followers of the state socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, their draft programme was to be presented to the unity congress of the two groups meeting in the medieval town of Gotha in Thuringia. However, it was a hodgepodge, a melange of Marxist and Lassallean ideas. Marx’s comrades agreed a series of rotten compromises, the result of diplomatic hagglings, not hard politics and polemical victories. Justification: the opportunist holy grail of unity for the sake of unity.
Rightly, Marx objected. He exasperatedly attacked this “deplorable” situation that was bound to prove “demoralising for the party”.11 He presented a string of eviscerating criticisms. He also offered the advice that, unless his formulations, or something very much like them, were adopted, then it would be better, far better, to stay as separate organisations and find areas where they could agree common action. Rather disunity and maintaining principle than unprincipled unity. So Marx was not objecting to the German party equipping itself with a programme, as SWP loyalists try to make out. Ignorance - that or downright dishonesty.
Marx defended the old Eisenach programme of 1869. However, given the unification of a little Germany - which left out Austria and was brought about under the auspices of the Prussian state in 1871 - he could not but recognise the need for updating it. The Marx-Engels team advocated a big Germany, a single and indivisible German republic won from below. Obviously, the Marxist programme had to take account of the Bismarckian unification and adjust strategically according to the new circumstances.
Be that as it may, neither Marx-Engels nor anyone standing in the authentic Marxist tradition has ever denied the necessity of a programme. It was the revisionist, Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), who openly belittled the programme and tried to theoretically justify elevating the organisation of the party into a thing for itself. Unconsciously this was echoed and hardened into dogma by the SWP’s Machiavellian founder-leader, Tony Cliff, who throughout most of his political life routinely warned against adopting a programme. Gaining recruits and factional advantage was his sole guide.
Yes, a democratically agreed programme would have created intolerable difficulties for the SWP central committee and its many and sudden about-turns under Cliff. True, in 1950, when his Socialist Review Group was ensconced deep in the bowels of the Labour Party, Cliff did draw up a 12-point programme of “transitional demands”, which were designed to attract and recruit “individual” Labour and trade union activists:
1. The complete nationalisation of heavy industry, the banks, insurance and the land.
2. The renationalisation without compensation of all denationalised industries.
3. Suspend interest on the national debt. Compensation to ex-owners only as a result of an income test administered by elected workers’ committees.
4. A majority of workers’ representatives on all nationalised and area boards subject to frequent election, immediate recall and receiving the average wage obtaining in the industry.
5. Two or more workers’ representatives to sit on boards of all private concerns employing 20 or more people with access to all documents.
6. Workers’ committees to control hiring and firing and working conditions.
7. Abolition of payments for national health service and of private beds.
8. Establishment of principle of full work or full maintenance.
9. Sliding scale of adequate pensions based on new and realistic cost-of-living indices.
10. Interest-free housing loans to local authorities and drastic powers to requisition and rent free, state-owned land.
11. A foreign policy based on independence of both Washington and Moscow.
12. Withdrawal of British troops overseas; freedom of colonial peoples and offer of economic and technical aid.12
But, with the turn away from deep entryism in the late 1960s, this bog-standard left Labourism was abandoned for the eclectic ‘Luxemburgism’ of the International Socialists. It has been rumoured that in the early 1970s Cliff’s loyal lieutenant, Chris Harman, penned a draft programme. Needless to say, it still gathers dust in the archives at HQ - perhaps doomed never to see the light of day. Cliff wanted nothing more to do with programmes - even a “transitional” one (that is, until two years before his death and the now almost totally forgotten and thoroughly minimalist 1998 Action programme).
What went for Cliff went double for his chosen successor, John Rees, especially with his Respect popular front adventure. The original aim of Respect was, of course, to unite “secular socialists with Muslim activists” on the basis of whatever it took to get elected.13 Much to the discredit of the post-Rees SWP, it has steadfastly refused to conduct a thorough-going autopsy into the Respect disaster. Indeed, the central committee continues to blithely subordinate principle to expediency.
‘Programmatically’ the SWP therefore remains ‘unencumbered’ - apart, that is, from its ‘What the SWP stands for’ column in Socialist Worker (and the slightly different ‘About us’ which appears in SWP online). Except for the most narrow-minded loyalists, it is clear that this thumbnail sketch contains little more than a few selected SWP shibboleths - there is certainly no overall strategy. Opportunism is thereby given free rein and the SWP directed not according to the final aim, but short-term interest, whim and hunch.
Notes
1. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 23, London 1988, p243.
2. K Marx Theories of surplus value part one, Moscow 1969, p14.
3. www.tusc.org.uk/policy.php.
4. www.icl-fi.org/english/icldop/index.html.
5. J Conrad Which road? London 1991, pp235-36.
6. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 27, London 1990, p220.
7. J Conrad Which road? London 1991, pp239.
8. Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, p238.
9. Internal Bulletin No3, quoted in Weekly Worker December 22 2011.
10. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p78.
11. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p78.
12. www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/where-swp-coming.
13. Socialist Worker November 20 2004.
*Britain’s road to socialism (2011) is credited with being the eighth edition. Each has excused a further shift to the right and was almost instantly made outdated by the course of everyday events. None more so, though, than the BRS adopted by the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain in November 1989. Its Labour Party road to socialism was premised on what was supposed to be the “decisively” shifting international balance of class forces. “Socialism” in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and China would allow a peaceful and Labour Party road to national socialism in Britain. Needless to say, when the CPB rewrote its programme in 1992, though the Soviet Union and the “socialist countries” in eastern Europe had to be crudely airbrushed out, the Labourism remained. Apologetics inevitably produce such miserable results.