21.02.2013

Programme and Party: Broad bad, mass good

Opportunists require mushy politics and meaningless phrases when they set out to deceive. Jack Conrad argues in favour of a mass working class party and the kind of principles and politics outlined in the Communist manifesto, the Erfurt programme and the programme of the Parti Ouvrier

Almost without exception the left pays fulsome tribute to the Manifesto of the Communist Party, aka the 1848 Communist manifesto authored by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Revealingly, though not surprisingly, Chris Harman (1942-2009), editor of Socialist Worker for over 20 years, wrote glowingly about the Communist manifesto in his introduction to the 2003 Bookmarks edition - but revealingly he could not bring himself to admit that this “pamphlet” - as he consistently, guiltily, called it - was actually a programme.¹

Of course, the Socialist Workers Party is programmophobic - at least when it comes to the programmes of classical Marxism. For a rank-and-file member to advocate that the SWP debate and agree a Marxist programme is to court expulsion. And without a programme to commit them to basic Marxist principles, Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber and Martin Smith have been free to pursue every leftist whim, every rightist fancy.

For example, in the 2010 general election that saw them standing candidates under the rightist umbrella of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. The stated goal of Tusc’s main sponsor - the Socialist Party in England and Wales - is to gain the support of the NUT, PCS, FBU, RMT, POA, UCU and other trade unions. Naturally towards that end “the trade union leaders that are involved in Tusc have a veto over what’s decided … in other words, they have ownership of Tusc”.² An imitation Labour Party on a Lilliputian scale, which in the last analysis amounts to reconciliation with the bourgeois state, because the trade union bureaucracy sets the political agenda.

Before that, along with John Rees and Lindsey German, the same SWP tops stood candidates for Respect on a platform of crass populism, unfufillable Keynesian nonsense and wretched fudge. Disregarding the ABCs of Marxism, the dark professor defined Respect as uniting “secular socialists and Muslim activists”.³ A minuscule popular front party designed to band together the SWP, George Galloway, the Muslim Association of Britain and a layer of Asian businessmen. And towards that end comrade German made her infamous “shibboleth” speech on gay rights to the Marxism 2003 event.⁴ Protests there were. But not from SWP loyalists. A defining moment. Clearly the rightwing ‘shadow’ once again exercised a veto: secularism, international socialism, republicanism and a women’s right to choose to have an abortion were all excluded from Respect’s political platform.

Unfortunately, the SWP and SPEW are far from alone. Frustrated by their inability to break into the ‘big time’, too many organisations on the left seek to put together a broad party which the chosen sect can direct, manipulate and feed off. Socialist Resistance, Workers Power, Anti-Capitalist Initiative, Independent Socialist Network, etc all adhere to the same method. Hence, depending on the particular sponsor, the broad party is designed to net one or another non-working class ideological current: Scottish nationalism, Islamism, anarchism, occupy direct-actionism, Labour reformism, pacifism, Maoism, ‘official communism’, etc. Of necessity, the platforms, or programmes, of these various broad parties are dictated by the needs of diplomatic unity-mongering: therefore they reek of equivocation, economism and compromise.

By contrast communists aim not for a broad party, but a mass party. A mass workers’ party built around an internationalist programme whose principles and strategy not only map out the road to class unity, state power and human liberation. The principles and strategy of the programme also combine together to set the limits when it comes to the party’s membership: ie, by default Scottish nationalists, Islamists, anarchists, occupyists, Labour reformists, pacifists, Maoists, ‘official communists’, trade union bureaucrats, etc are locked out, transformed or removed.

1848

The Communist manifesto can be described as a minimum-maximum programme. Fulfilling the minimum programme under capitalism creates the conditions for the practical beginning of the maximum programme (though some minimum demands might well be fulfilled only after the socialist revolution, so there is a certain blurring). In the Communist manifesto we read that “Communists fight for the attainment of immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”⁵ Being a global programme, or at least a Euro-American programme - ie, for those countries where modern capitalism and the working class had taken root - the Communist manifesto outlined both the goal of a communist society and the goals communists fight for under capitalism. That includes, of course, high politics.

Hence, in Germany, Marx’s comrades are for the overthrow of the monarchs and petty princes and a fight against the “petty bourgeois”, all in alliance with the bourgeoisie. That would be “but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution”.⁶

Interestingly, a necessary addition soon came. With the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (1848), Marx and Engels supplemented the Communist manifesto with a series of minimum demands and certainly, when it came to their attitude towards the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and small peasants, corrected it. The Demands do not present the bourgeoisie as an ally against the forces of reaction. Instead the “proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants” are urged to support “with all possible energy” the 17 minimum demands outlined by the communists.⁷

Amongst those demands are universal suffrage (demand 2); “universal arming of the people” (demand 4); aid for the peasantry (demands 6-9); a “state bank” to replace all private banks (demand 10); nationalisation of the means of transport (demand 11); “complete separation of church and state” (demand 13); “universal free education” (demand 17). Beginning, but also capping them all, is the demand that the “whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic”: ie, a big Germany, including Austria (demand 1). Only the democratic republic can ensure and safeguard the minimum programme.

Erfurt

There is also much to be learnt from the programme adopted by the Social Democratic Party of Germany at its Erfurt congress in 1891. Here, however, unlike with the Communist manifesto, most contemporary lefts almost automatically dismiss the Erfurt programme as having relevance only for semi-autocratic kaiser Germany and the period of class peace. Either that or it is held up as a terrible warning, because in 1914 SPDers in the Reichstag unanimously voted for war credits (by convention the fraction always acted as a bloc).

Clearly there was an opportunist drift away from the programme to the point where there was, yes, on August 4 1914, a qualitative break. But not by the whole party. There was always strong and vocal opposition. And a big split occurred in April 1917 with the formation of the Independent SPD (USPD) - which included Karl Kautsky. By 1919 the USPD boasted 750,000 members (the Spartacist League of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, Franz Mehring and Leo Jogiches constituted themselves an open faction till the formation of the Communist Party of Germany). Note, the right wing was accused of having “violated” the class and internationalist principles of the Erfurt programme.⁸ At the founding congress in Gotha the increasingly marginalised Kautsky declared that the ‘government socialists’ had “betrayed” the programme and its mission (the renegade obviously dreamt of recementing unity on the basis of the Erfurt programme). But, this position, comments Pierre Broué, “was no doubt the real feeling of most delegates”.⁹

Not that the Erfurt programme is above criticism. Especially with hindsight, one can find the germs of August 1914. Rather than risk being made illegal once again, the SPD leadership preferred to avoid awkward issues: ie, the democratic republic. What was omitted therefore has great significance. But the germs of a cancer are not the same as a cancer. To reject organising our programme into maximum and minimum sections on the basis of August 1914 is certainly to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The Erfurt programme was initially drafted by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, leading members of the SPD’s executive, who asked Engels, in a “strictly confidential” communiqué, for his comments. Engels generously did as requested in the document we now know as Critique of the Erfurt programme (though what he actually criticised was the first draft). Most of his suggestions were incorporated into the final draft written by Karl Kautsky. The version agreed by the Erfurt congress meeting over October 14-21 1891.

Having looked over the first draft, Engels remarked that it “differs very favourably from the former programme”: that is, the Gotha programme of 1875, of which Marx had so thoroughly disapproved because of its unprincipled and unnecessary compromises with Lassalleanism.¹⁰

Not surprisingly then, Engels greeted the Erfurt congress as a victory. Vital lines of demarcation had been successfully introduced. This is Engels writing to Adolph Sorge in America:

We have had the satisfaction of seeing Marx’s critique win all along the line. Even the last traces of Lassalleanism have been eliminated. With the exception of a few poorly written bits (though it’s only the way they’re put that is feeble and commonplace), there is nothing to complain of in the programme - or not, at any rate, at first reading.¹¹

The Erfurt programme is organised into two parts. The first part outlines the fundamental principles of socialism - what goals Marxists aim for - while the second enumerates the “demands which the social democracy makes of present-day society” - the hows.¹²

The programme opens with a brief analysis of capitalism and its development. Monopoly concentrates production and increases the number of workers. The middle classes are being squeezed and there is a general growth of insecurity. The programme calls for the social ownership of the means of production and includes the forthright statement that only the working class can bring about the liberation of humanity. Other classes are tied to “existing society”.

However - and this is of some considerable importance - the Erfurt programme is emphatic: the working class cannot rely on mere trade unionism,

The struggle of the working class against capitalistic exploitation is of necessity a political struggle. The working class cannot carry on its economic contests, and cannot develop its economic organisation, without political rights. It cannot bring about the transference of the means of production into the possession of the community without having obtained political power.¹³

Giving the struggle of the working class “a conscious and unified form, and to show it its necessary goal” are the tasks of the SPD.¹⁴ The Erfurt programme is also quite emphatic that there is no national road to the supersession of capitalism:

The interests of the working classes are the same in all countries with a capitalistic mode of production. With the extension of the world’s commerce, and of production for the world market, the position of the worker in every country grows ever more dependent on the position of the worker in other countries. The liberation of the working class, accordingly, is a work in which the workmen of all civilised countries are equally involved. In recognition of this, the SPD of Germany feels and declares itself to be one with the class-conscious workmen of all other countries.¹⁵

The SPD is not fighting for new class privileges and class rights, but for the abolition of class rule and of “classes themselves” (a formulation suggested by Engels), for equal rights and “equal duties of all,” without distinction of sex or descent (another Engels suggestion - he wanted to rid the programme of the specifically bourgeois meaning of equality).

After this, the maximum section, the programme logically proceeds to the minimum section and how the SPD will combat “within existing society” not only the exploitation and oppression of wage-earners, but “every kind of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, a party, a sex or a race”.¹⁶

The programme proposes “to begin with” 10 key political demands. Engels had argued for a different, surely more militant, formulation: “social democracy fights for all demands which help it approach this goal” of a classless society.¹⁷

The 10 demands can be summarised as follows: “universal, equal and direct suffrage”; proportional representation, biennial parliaments and pay for elected representatives (demand 1); “self-determination and self-government of the people in realm, state, province and parish”, election of magistrates and annual voting of taxes (demand 2); education on the right of “all to bear arms”, a militia in “place of the standing army”, questions of war and peace to be decided by elected representatives and settlement of “all international disputes by arbitration” (demand 3); abolition of all laws which limit or suppress the “right of meeting and coalition” (demand 4); abolition of all laws which “place women, whether in a public or a private capacity, at a disadvantage as compared with men” (demand 5); “declaration that religion is a private affair” (a formulation criticised by Marx back in 1875 because for the party religion is not a private matter), the end of public funding “upon ecclesiastical and religious objects”, and ecclesiastical and religious bodies to be regarded as private associations, which regulate their affairs entirely independently (demand 6); “secularisation of schools” (demand 7); “free administration of justice” and election of judges (demand 8); free health service (demand 9); graduated income and property tax for “defraying all public expenses”, and abolition of all indirect taxes (demand 10).¹⁸

Then come five minimum economic demands designed to protect and improve the lot of the working class, such as an eight-hour day, prohibition of child labour under 14, inspection of workplaces, and a national insurance system administered in the main by representatives of the workers.

Kautsky wrote a semi-official commentary on the Erfurt programme, a short book called The class struggle (1892). This explained in popular form the theories of Marx and Engels, not least Marx’s analysis of capitalism presented in Capital. The class struggle was widely read in Europe and the US between its first publication and 1914. A sort of Marxist bible. Translated into 16 languages, it certainly influenced Marxists in Russia, not least Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin).

Rightly, the reasoning behind the Erfurt programme lay in the conviction that the Marxist party had to win for itself a mass membership and a clear majority in society. After the repeal of the anti-socialist laws in 1890, the SPD had indeed experienced rapid growth and sank deep roots. Membership was to grow to a million, the number of Reichstag deputies seemed to be set to inexorably increase with each election and powerful trade unions were built. However, under such benign circumstances the spread of opportunism was inevitable (a tendency articulated most honestly and ably by Eduard Bernstein in his Evolutionary socialism - it is in fact an exceedingly bad book).

Engels was well aware of the opportunism within the SPD. There were those who imagined that they could simply lay hold of the kaiser state and peaceably reform Germany all the way to socialism. While being prepared to admit the possibility of a peaceful revolution in countries such as Britain and the US, Engels insisted that such a road was closed for Germany. To suggest otherwise was to act as a cover for absolutism.

Though it had a material basis in the Reichstag fraction, in trade union officialdom and in the SPD apparatus, the rightist trend remained a minority in the SPD, or at least a largely hidden one, till August 1914. Only then did it burst out into the open in full force, and in the disorientating panic and crazy confusion that accompanied the outbreak of World War I it managed to secure the silence, or sullen cooperation, of the majority of members. Most would have thought that the war would soon be over, perhaps by Christmas, and that the jingoistic madness would cure itself.

But neither creeping opportunism nor full-blown social-imperialism can be blamed on the programme. There is no direct correlation. Indeed the right, at least in the form of Bernstein, opened the “first serious theoretical attack” against the Marxist foundations of the programme.¹⁹ Others were not so bold. Instead they paid lip service. Eg, the leading right opportunists projected the maximum section of the programme - the prospect of socialism and universal human liberation - to a further and further distant horizon. Like the SWP, SPEW, Socialist Resistance et al, the right opportunists came to regard socialism as just an empty phrase - but one which earned them applause at rallies and meetings.

Meanwhile, they treated the minimum section of the programme more and more as maximum demands. Secularism, arming the people and the election of judges were talked of as being too advanced for the existing consciousness of the workers and therefore not to be agitated for in election campaigns, on May Day demonstrations or anywhere else. What really mattered to the right was maintaining the party’s finances, winning votes in Reichstag elections and securing better pay and conditions for trade union members. That was supposedly the real labour movement.

Engels

It surely incumbent on all genuine Marxists to treat with the greatest seriousness both the praise heaped upon the Erfurt programme by Engels … and his criticism. Some good Trotskyite comrades - for example, Mark Hoskisson of Permanent Revolution - have it that Engels saw the “danger of democratism obliterating revolutionary socialism, through an over-emphasis on minimal political demands”.²⁰ In fact, the exact opposite is true. The Erfurt programme is lacking in … democratism.

Engels writes to the SPD executive that: “The political demands of the draft have one great fault. It lacks precisely what should have been said. If all the demands [outlined above - JC] were granted, we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no wise have been achieved.”²¹

Germany was in 1891 still ruled under an extension of the anti-democratic Prussian constitution of 1850. A constitution which concentrated power in the hands of the monarch and the governmental bureaucracy, not the people. Engels calls the Reichstag a “fig leaf” for absolutism - an absolutism that was always prepared to turn to openly counterrevolutionary means. Famously, the conservative deputy, Elard von Oldenburg, told the assembled Reichstag, to ringing applause: the German emperor “must be able at any moment to say to a lieutenant: Take 10 men and shut the Reichstag”.²²

Hence, Engels reiterates the demand for a democratic republic. A single and indivisible republic: ie, the abolition of the Prussian kaiser and the system of petty states within the German empire like the minuscule Thuringia (analogous to the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, etc). This owes nothing to a desire to finish the “incomplete bourgeois revolution”.²³ Engels is insistent: “our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”²⁴ He repeats the point a few lines down: “In my view, the proletariat can only use the form of the one and indivisible republic.” And here, as with so much else, Engels was, of course, perfectly in tune with Marx. He too viewed the democratic republic as the form of the rule of the working class.

Engels is well aware of the difficulties of bluntly stating this in the Erfurt programme. The anti-socialist laws still loom threateningly over the SPD. They could easily be reintroduced and the party forced underground once more. Yet he says there must be some subtle phrase that would get around the legal problem: he recommends “the concentration of all political power in the hands of the people’s representatives” - that would serve for the “time being”.²⁵ A formulation not included in the Erfurt programme, however. A major flaw.

Engels warns that “forgetting of the great, the principal considerations” - specifically he had in mind the democratic republic - for what he calls the “momentary interests of the day” is a “sacrifice of the future movement” for its “present”. This, Engels says, may be “honestly” meant, but it is and remains opportunism - and “honest” opportunism is “perhaps the most dangerous of all”.²⁶ Bernstein, of course, honestly espoused the opportunist maxim that the movement was everything, the final goal nothing. And Kautsky opposed Bernsteinism, conducting an orthodox defence of the minimum-maximum programme, as did Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Bernsteinism was officially condemned at the SPD’s Dresden congress and in its turn by the Second International. Bernstein’s revisionism was part of an attempt to replace the policy of the conquest of power through victory by “a policy which accommodates itself with the existing order”.²⁷ Given what happened later, it would assuredly have been correct to have gone one better and expel him then and there - even though he was thought of as an isolated individual at the time, the fact of the matter was that opportunism was insidiously gaining strength and confidence.

Of course, what often passes for Trotskyism takes passages in Kautsky’s The class struggle - and similar articles and books - which advocate an extension of popular power through the Reichstag as an unMarxist vacillation “towards a reformist application of the programme”.²⁸ Eg, “A genuine parliamentary regime can be as much an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an instrument of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” But this is just as much the view of Marx and Engels as it is of Kautsky. It is certainly not Bernsteinism. After all, a genuine parliamentary regime would necessitate the overthrow of the kaiser constitution - as it would the overthrow of the UK’s constitutional monarchy system, which contains all manner of devious checks and balances against democracy.

Programme of Parti Ouvrier

This minimum-maximum programme was drawn up in May 1880, when Jules Guesde, a leading French socialist, met Marx in Engels’ front room in Primrose Hill (not that we should forget the assistance provided by Engels and Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue - who, along with Guesde, became a leading figure in the Marxist wing of French socialism). Anyway, the preamble, which amounts to the maximum section of the programme, was dictated by Marx himself - “word for word”, according to Engels.²⁹

It reads as follows:

Considering that the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race; that the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production; that there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them: the individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress; the collective form, the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society; considering that this collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class - or proletariat - organised in a distinct political party; that such an organisation must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, which will thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation; the French socialist workers, in adopting as the aim of their efforts the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production, have decided, as a means of organisation and struggle, to enter the elections with the following immediate demands.³⁰

The programme then moves on to political demands for the abolition of all laws over the press, meetings and associations and for women’s equality “in relation to man”; removal of subsidies to religious orders and the return to the nation of the “‘goods said to be mortmain, movable and immovable’ (decree by the Commune of April 2 1871), including all the industrial and commercial annexes of these corporations”; suppression of the public debt; “abolition of standing armies and the general arming of the people”; communes “to be master of its administration and its police”.

The economic section calls for the eight-hour day, a ban on child labour under 14 and between that age and 16 the “reduction of the working day from eight to six hours”; protective supervision of apprentices by the workers’ organisations; a legal minimum wage, determined each year according to the local price of food, by a workers’ statistical commission; legal prohibition of bosses employing foreign workers at a wage less than that of French workers; equal pay for equal work, for workers of both sexes; scientific and professional instruction of all children, “with their maintenance the responsibility of society, represented by the state and the commune”; responsibility of society for the old and the disabled; prohibition of all interference by employers in the administration of “workers’ friendly societies, provident societies, etc, which are returned to the exclusive control of the workers”; responsibility of the bosses in the matter of accidents, guaranteed by security paid by the employer into the workers’ funds, and in proportion to the number of workers employed and the danger that the industry presents; intervention by the workers in the special regulations of the various workshops; an end to the right usurped by the bosses to “impose any penalty on their workers in the form of fines or withholding of wages” (decree by the Commune of April 27 1871); annulment of all the contracts that have alienated public property (banks, railways, mines, etc), and the exploitation of all state-owned workshops to be entrusted to the workers who work there; abolition of all indirect taxes and transformation of all direct taxes into a progressive tax on incomes over 3,000 francs; suppression of all inheritance on “all direct inheritance over 20,000 francs”.

So here we have another example of the hand of Marx (and Engels) in formulating a minimum-maximum programme. It was adopted, with a few amendments, by the founding congress of the Parti Ouvrier, meeting at Le Havre in November 1880. Laconically, Marx said of this programme that “this very brief document in its economic section consists solely of demands that actually have spontaneously arisen out of the labour movement itself. There is in addition an introductory passage where the communist goal is defined in a few lines.”³¹ However, Engels glowingly described the first, maximum, section as “a masterpiece of cogent argumentation rarely encountered, clearly and succinctly written for the masses; I myself was astonished by this concise formulation”.³²

Yet for right-moving lefts the programme of the Parti Ouvrier appears to be exactly the kind of “broad platform” that could serve as a model for what is needed to “bring together a broad organisation” in today’s Britain.³³ An obvious case of misreading both the programme and history. The fact of the matter is that the Parti Ouvrier was not a “broad organisation” and its programme, of course, was at least partially designed to draw lines of demarcation.

Proudhonists, Blanquists, anti-political syndicalists and anarchists either stayed clear or were kept away by the programme’s commitment to transform universal suffrage from an “instrument of deception” into an “instrument of emancipation.” Their naive vision of socialism relied upon cooperatives, the revolutionary coup, the general strike or the exemplary action. The anarchists, for example, “formed their own group”.³⁴ Many turned to the propaganda of the deed.

Not that the Parti Ouvrier should be viewed as any kind of model organisationally. As Guesde and his close followers tried to impose centralised party structures through dictat, a bitter dispute broke out between them and possiblists grouped around Paul Brousse and Benoît Malon. Possiblists because they claimed to be committed to “realise the greatest sum of communism possible”.³⁵

Brousse had founded the monthly journal Le Travail in March 1880, which was open to all “schools” of socialism, not least the anarchists, an ideology with which he retained an enduring sympathy. His conception of the party was therefore federalist and, yes, broad to the point of being little more than a loose network. As for Malon, he was determined to keep the door of the Parti Ouvrier open to “social Radicals, who still had the allegiance of the working class, thus creating a broad-based party stretching from anarchists on the left to Radicals on the right”.³⁶ To “bring together” their “broad based organisation” the possiblists launched an “attack on the minimum programme”.³⁷ Correctly, Brousse and Malon saw the minimum programme as an obstacle to the unity they desired.

The whole thing culminated in a congress held in Saint-Étienne in 1882 and a messy split. The Guesdist minority walked out and held their own rival congress in Roanne. Marx was unfairly accused of engineering the split from London and Marxism was roundly cursed and bitterly denounced. The possiblists went on to abandon the minimum programme in the name of unity and the formation of trade congresses, which were supposed to serve as basic units of the future socialist order.

In 1883 the Broussists opened the doors to all “workers struggling against their exploiters without distinction of school”. As a “broad party” they adopted the title Socialist Federation of Socialist Workers of France. Suffice to say, the masses did not flock in. Nor did the rival sects. Brousse himself dejectedly evolved in the direction of municipal socialism, piecemeal reformism and a permanent alliance with the Radicals.

There is surely a repeating pattern involved here, especially when we consider the Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Scottish Socialist Party, Respect and the equal failure of much more serious “broad party” projects in Europe, such as Rifondazione Comunista and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste. A repeating pattern that we need to stop repeating.