This appeared as an editorial piece in Socialist Review in February 1980, under the title, "Only a pawn in their game"
Our last issue carried a short editorial piece headlined. "A New Cold War" as a question. The question mark hardly seems appropriate now. after the further raising of IS arms spending, the attempts to sabotage the Moscow Olympics. Carrington's tour of the \arious dictators and slave owners who run the West Asian chunk of the "free world". Carter's insistence that the US must be 'the most powerful nation on Earth'.
For this reason we make no apology for devoting a sizeable chunk of this issue to the new cold war. In factories and workplaces arguments over it have confronted socialists - arguments that have not always been easy to deal with. And so we also make no apology for summarising our main conclusions here.
*Afghanistan has not been the cause of the drive towards the new cold war. Henry
Kissinger admitted that the country was '80 per cent' under Russian influence long
before the day in December when Amin wasreplaced by Karmal. The blast of propaganda in the West about a 'Russian threat' to Asia is not motivated by the coup in Kabul.
but by a desire to justify a Western build updof arms that began well before that coup (see Andrew Milner's article).
* The 'revolutionaries' whose governments have succeeded each other in
Kabul were not put in power initially by thevRussians. They were based on a section of the local middle class that sought to push the country along the road ot national independence and capitalist or state capitalist'modernisation', so that it could overcome its backwardness and be like anv other country. They were 'progressive' in the sense, and only in that sense, as the regime of Nasser in Egypt or Boumidien in
Algeria. Their goal meant uprooting age-old forms of oppression, but it also meant
imposing new forms of domination and exploitation.
It is a general rule that the more backward (or devastated) a country, and the later the attempt to travel along the toad ot state capitalist 'modernisation' and economic independence the greater the barriers to success. For those who try it appears that only the crudest and bloodiest repressive measures can break through these. For the mass of people the resulting oppression can be as great as anything they suffered under the old order. Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia provides testimony to what this can mean in extreme instances.
In the modern world 'progressive' national development can bounce back from the barriers to its advance and even force society backwards.
That is whv in Afghanistan the Taraki regime fell to the Amin regime, and why the Amin regime lost control of much of the country to the rebels. The efforts of the
urban middle class to uproot the past had reached an impasse. The 'progressive' middle class could break eggs with increased repression, but it could not produce the omelettes which would, in its own terms, justify the viciousness of its measures.
* The rebel movements did not grow up.in the first place, as national liberationmovements. They emerged when the Russian presence was still restricted to a relatively small number of 'advisors', in opposition to the nationalist, modernising zeal of the middle class in the towns. They were fighting to defend old localised forms of oppression and exploitation. They stood for the semi-feudal land system as againstreform, for the traditional subjection ofwomen as against moves to reduce the bride price, for petty local tribalisms as against the creation of a genuine national entity. It was these aims that gave their Islamic ideology its material content.
If comparisons have to be made, they should not be with liberation movements like those fighting against western imperialism in Africa or Latin America, or under attack from a Russian backed regime in Eritrea, but with the reactionary movements based among sections of the peasantry, that opposed the bourgeois revolutions of the West: the peasants of Western France who rose in the Vendee Royalist revolt against the French revolution; or the Carlists peasants of Northern Spain who fought under religious banners against the most minimal attempts to introduce liberal reforms into Spain in the civil wars of the 1830s. the 1870s and 1936. The fact that such movements gained genuine local support, even from the poorer peasants, does not make them into movements lor national liberation
In the ease oi Afghanistan, the Western powes are seekmg to utilise the rebels, not to liberate the countrv. but to replace Russian bv Western domination. The character of the rebel movements will most likely make them easv meat tor such manoeuvres.
* The Russian takeover will not breakthe impasse faced bv the regime in Kabul. Itwill not. in anv sense, take Afghanistanforward. In all likelihood it will turn againstthe regime much of the urban middle class as well as the Muslim tribesmen. It will encourage precisely the clinging to archaic religious beliefs and customs that can be witnessed among the Muslin peoples of the USSR itself (see the article by Victor Haynes). This is shown by the fact thatKarmal has already retreated from some of the reforms imposed by his predecessors Taraki and Amin. The Russian presence
cannot in any sense solve the problems of the Afghan people. It can only make them
worse.
* The motives behind the Russian invasion have nothing to do with a desire to
advance 'progress' in Afghanistan. Like the Americans in Vietnam in the mid-sixties, the Russians are out to prove that they can police their own sphere of influence. They were worried by the threats to the regime in Kabul because its downfall would have been a blow to their prestige and made it more difficult for them to control the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, the national minorities inside Russia. One of the aims of the tank movements near the Kyber has been to remind workers in Prague and Budapest and Warsaw and Leningrad — of what happened in 1956 and 1968.
* Afghanistan will never begin to be able to escape from the morass of oppression and poverty until it is free from the attentions of all imperialist forces. The Russian troops are not going to solve its problems. Neither would the installation of a US-backed 'rebel' regime — it is worth remembering the hundreds of thousands who starved in the famine of the early 1970s, unnoticed by the Western media because there were no Russian tanks to blame.
Even if. by some miracle, the rival imperialisms were to leave Afghanistan alone, the problems facing its peoples would be all but insuperable. The physical resources just do not exist for either capitalism or 'socialism' in one country. They could only be provided by a revolutionary breakthrough on an inter¬national scale — whether beginning in Iran and the Arab states to the West, the Indian subcontinent to the South, the Russian state capitalist giant to the North, or for that matter, in the distant heartlands of Western imperialism.
* The future for the peoples of the whol eworld will be grim if. on each side, they allow themselves to be enveigled into supporting their own ruling class and the bloc to which they belong against rivalruling classes belonging to the other bloc.
We have to do our utmost to resist the pressures in this direction, which means standing up against the attempts to create popular enthusiasm for the new cold war in the country in which we find oursleves.
If we were in Russia, that would mean vigorously arguing against the takeover of Afghanistan and welcoming every defeat of the army of occupation. But we are in Britain, where the slogan 'Russians out ot Afghanistan' is being used to justify in¬creased arms spending . the movement ot the US Fleet to the Gulf, the British base in Diego Garcia, the British officers in Oman, the supply of guns to the hangman in Pakistan. We have to oppose these move-and the ideology behind them.
We have to insist: All imperialist hands-off Asia; No arms for the hangman who rules Pakistan or the slave owners who rule the Gulf states; End the American threat to Iran: the US Fleet out of the Gulf: British mercenary officers out of Oman; the Russians out of Afghanistan.
3 November 2009
Marxism and the Missiles 1980
This article appeared in Socialist Review 1980:9,October 1980. It is a critical analysis at the historian Edward Thompson theory of "exterminism"
One of the major themes running through Socialist Review over the last nine months has been the drive towards a new Cold War. We have insisted that it is a prime duty of socialists to resist this, and we have attempted to provide the arguments they need.
Until recently, however, our assumption was that we would be very much on the defensive over the question. The media were putting out a deluge of Cold War propaganda. There seemed to be no wider movement of resistance from which we could get support.
Over the summer, however, things have begun to change. The anti-bomb movement has suddenly taken on a new lease of life. From many different parts of the country come reports of very large public meetings, and of sizeable demonstrations, leading up to in what looks like being a very big protest in London on 26 October.
At the heart of the revived movement has been the historian E.P. Thompson. In articles in The Guardian and the New Statesman, in the pamphlet Protest and Survive, and in scores of public meetings, he has polemicised brilliantly against the Cruise missile. He has not been alone in putting the arguments. But it has been Thompson more than anyone else who has brought the movement back to life. And all credit is due to him for doing so.
It has also been Thompson who has provided whatever analysis the new movement has of the drive towards
Missile madness and of a strategy for combating it.
It is here that we in Socialist Review (and the SWP generally) have to dissent from what Thompson says.
Thompson's strategy is, quite simply, to arouse the largest possible numbers of people to protest at the decision to deploy the Cruise missiles:
'We must generate an alternative logic, an opposition at every level of society. The opposition must be international and must win the support of multitudes. It must bring its influence to bear upon the rulers of the world.' (Protest and Survive) Who is to make up this opposition? The impression you get from reading Protest and Survive is that Thompson is looking essentially for the same sort of people who made up CND 20 years ago and who turned out in considerable numbers to the public meetings over the summer — the articulate middle classes, people with university degrees, or pos¬sibly studying for them.
'As it happens the major bases (for the Cruise missiles) are to be placed in close proximity to the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and it seems to me that useful work can be done from these old bases of European civilisation. There will be work of research, of publication, and also work of conscience, all of which is very suitable for scholars... Oxford and Cambridge then are privileged toinitiate this campaign.' But it can involve:
'Any existing institution or even individual, universities and colleges — or groups within them — trade unionists, women's organisations, members of professions, churches, practitioners of Esperanto or chess...' With these:
'Before long we will be crossing frontiers..., bursting open bureau¬crats' doors, making the telephone tappers spin in their hideaways...and breaking up all the old stoney Stalinist reflexes of the East by forc¬ing open dialogue and debate...' If this were all that Thompson were arguing, we would be tempted to make a few words of protest. Even on the basis of purely arithmetic calculation it seems a bit strange to give no more prominence to 12 million trade union¬ists than to the half a million members of professions, the two million church¬goers or the 45,000 university dons — particularly when all the emphasis is on the dons.
But Thompson does not end his argument there. Underlying his com¬ments in Protest and Survive is a wide reaching attempt at analysis of the new Cold War dedicated to refuting the notion that 'the bomb is a class issue*.This is most openly argued by him in a recent issue of New Left Review.
The burden of Thompson's analysis is that society East and West has reached a new and terrifying stage in its develop¬ment — Exterminism.
'Exterminism designates those charac¬teristics of a society which thrust it in the direction whose outcome must be the extermination of millions...' It results from 'the accumulation and perfection of the means of extermination and the structuring of whole societies so that these will be directed towards that end,'
The factors which gave rise to 'exterminism' may once have been imperialist interests or the pursuit of profit by military-industrial complexes. But the methods used initially by ruling classes in the rational pursuit of their interests have taken on an irrational life of their own and are no longer reducible to their original courses.
'What originated as reaction becomesdirection. What isjustified by rationalself-interest by one power or the otherbecomes in the collison of the two,irrational. We are confronted withthe accumulated logic of process.'To treat this outcome as the productof 'rational' choices by ruling classes is'to impose a consequential rationalityupon an 'irrational' object.
Exterminism has to be challenged by the presentation of an 'alternative' logic, by:
'Initiating a counter logic, a thrust of process leading towards the dis¬solution of both blocs, the demystifi-cation of exterminism's ideological mythology.'
It is this which has to be achieved by the alliance of 'churches, Eurocommunists, Labourites, East European dissidents (and not only "dissidents")... trade unionists, ecologists...' As 'the blocs' swing 'off their collision course', 'the armourers and the police will lose their authority.'
Any talk of the bomb as a 'class issue' makes these tasks more difficult.'Class struggle continues in many forms across the globe. But exterminism itself is not a "class issue": it is a human issue.'
'Revolutionary posturing', Thompson insists, can only 'carry division into the necessary alliance of human resistance — indeed, worse than that, it can inflame exterminist ideology.' 'It should go without saying that exterminism can only be confronted by the broadest popular alliance, that is, by every affirmative resource in our culture.'
The analysisIs 'exterminism' something so entirely new in its irrationality?
The picture Thompson paints of rival blocs, each ruled by elites impris¬oned by the pressures of the military competition between them is correct. But it is by no means something out¬side the scope of old Marxist methods of class analysis.
Back in 1844 when Marx began to develop his ideas, he took over the notion of 'alienation' from the philo¬sophers Hegel and Feuerbach. He observed that in capitalist society the activity of people on the world becomes something separated from them, takes on a life of its own and comes to domi¬nate them.
'The object which labour produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer ...The more the worker spends him¬self, the more powerful the alien world becomes which he creates over against himself ...The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to himself but to his object.'
But for the young Marx it was not only the worker who became imprisoned in this 'alien' world beyond his or her control. So did the capitalist: he was alienated as well, even though he was 'happy in his alienation'.
The point of Marx's later work — especially Capital, was precisely to work out the way in which 'objective laws' came into existence that controlled this world of 'alienated labour'. Marx showed how the ability of the capitalist to extract surplus value from the workers at the point of production put a con¬tinual constraint on both the worker and the capitalist. The harder the worker works, the more wealth he creates for the capitalist. This wealth can then- be used to expand the productive forces at the disposal of the capitalist, to employ more workers and to create still more wealth for capital. The very labour of the worker has created the chains (even if the worker is well paid and they are 'golden chains') which tie him or her to endless production.
But the capitalist too is a prisoner. The very fact that exploitation and accumulation is possible for one capitalist makes it obligatory on all capitalists. Any capitalist who does not exploit in order to accumulate and accumulate in order to exploit will be driven out of business.
Yet, Marx went on to argue, the capitalist is doomed by the very world of alienated labour in which he thrives. The compulsion to endless accumu¬lation regardless of the consequences leads, in the short term, to repeated economic crises in which many capital¬ists go bankrupt. And in the long term it drives the whole capitalist system to economic stagnation, political chaos and social turmoil which in the end dooms the capitalist class, facing it either with socialist revolution or 'the mutual destruction of the contending classes'.
This did not mean that capitalists individually or as a class could be made to see sense and behave differently by reading Capital. Any capitalist who tried to do so would be driven out of business by the others. And so the ruling class necessarily identified the continuation of society as they knew it, of what they saw as 'civilisation', with enthusiastic imposition of measures that could only end by destroying that society. Only the violence of an insurg¬ent working class could make them step aside and allow the reorganisation of society on a rational basis.
Marx's analysis of the effects of 'peaceful' competition for markets might seem a far cry from the world of Cruise and Perishing. But in 1915 and 1916 the analysis was expanded to explain the bitter, bloody and apparently pointless war which had the great nations of Europe locked in combat, rapidly threatening to tear all of them apart.
Imperialism and 'Exterminism'
There was already one attempt at explanation of the war — expounded chiefly by the German socialist, Karl Kautsky — that went something like this:
The war was not at all in the interests of the great majority of capitalists on either side. They had been conned into believing by a minority of arms manu¬facturers that only through war could they defend their capitalist interests in the colonies. But in reality it would be the easiest thing in the world for the different capitalist powers to meet together and agree jointly to exploit the colonies. And so the war could be ended merely by bringing pressure to bear on capitalists to behave differently (or, as Thompson might have put it, to pursue 'an alternative logic').
This account of the war was challenged by the Bolshevik theorists, Bukharin and Lenin. Some aspects of Lenin's analysis of imperialism may not have stood the test of time. But in it, and even more so in Bukarin's Imperial¬ism are accounts of the 'logic' that produced World War One. And these can still throw much light on 'exterminism' today.
Lenin and Bukharin insisted that the development of capitalism leads to military competition complementing and even taking over from peaceful competition for markets.
For, as capitalism grows older two apparently contradictory things happen. On the one hand, within each country there is a concentration of economic power into fewer and fewer giant firms, increasingly integrated into state. Yet at the same time, the growing scale of pro¬duction means it can no longer be con¬tained within the narrow boundaries within which existing states operate.
The only way the contradiction can be resolved is if the national state can extend its powers beyond these boundaries within which existing states operate.
The only way the contradiction can be resolved is if the national state can extend its powers beyond these boundaries. It has to build up its armies, its navies, its airforces, its weaponry, so as to be able to safeguard markets, production facilities and raw material resources that exist abroad. This means annexing some territories, establishing spheres of influence over others, forcibly pressurising the rulers of the rest to safeguard its interests.
'The struggle between state capitalist trusts is decided in the first place by the relation between their military forces, for the military power of the country is the last resort of the struggling "national" groups of capitalists,' wrote Bukharin in 1916.
'The capitalists partition the world, not out of personal malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to get profits,' Lenin insisted a year later. But any partition could only be agreed on by all of them for a short period of time, since as some of them grew economically more quickly than others the military balance between the powers would shift and the stronger ones would demand a larger share of the world.
Under such circumstances, periods of peace 'inevitably can only be "breathing spells" between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the way for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars.'
Bukharin spelt the argument out again in 1921 in his Economics of the Transformation Period.
'The anarchy of world capitalism — the opposition between social world labour and "national" state appropriation — expresses itself in the collision of the state organisations and in capitalist wars... 'War is nothing other than the method of competition at a specific level of development...The method of competition between state capital¬ist trusts...'
Just as economic competition has a logic of its own, so Lenin and Bukharin argued the military competition does. Lenin observed that imperialism was characterised not just by the seizure of areas necessary to the national economy but areas which might strengthen the rural power if it possessed them and areas of importance from the point of view of military strategy. And Bukharin noted that the militarist structure of the state arose from the 'economic base', but like every "superstructure" reacted back on the base and moulded it in a certain direction.'
The point of this discussion of Marx, Lenin and Bukharin is not to show that Thompson has infringed some 'orthodoxy'. It is rather to emphasise that that he sees as completely new developments, right outside the perspectives of classic Marxism, are exactly the sorts of things that classic Marxism was trying to explain. Competition between manufactured products gave rise to competition between those fairly nasty classes of manufactured objects, Dreadnoughts, machine guns and poisonous gases and that in turn gave rise to competition between the most horrendous of manu¬factured objects, intercontinental ballis¬tic missiles and nuclear bombs. The level of alienation is raised to an incredible degree; the physical future of all members of all classes is put at risk. But all on the basis of the 'world of alienated labour', the capitalist relations of pro¬duction.
The Logic of the Cold War
Let's look briefly at what motivates the major protagonists of the Cold War.
The facts about the expansion of the interests of US capitalism beyond its national boundaries are well known: it controls about half the productive wealth of the world; firms like Ford or General Motors or the oil giants operate productive facilities in scores of countries; US investments overseas produce more output than any single country apart from the US itself and the USSR; the US banks receive the lion's share of the 88bn dollars a year which develop¬ing countries have to pay out on debt servicing each year. The point has been reached where the viability of almost all of the major US industrial corporations and banks depends upon maintaining intact integrated complexes of components operations throughout the 'free world': the great banks could be brought to their knees if one of the great debtor nations defaulted, even Ford would have gone bankrupt in the last couple of years but for its overseas operations.
Under such circumstances the rulers of the US see the frontiers of their vital interests as much wider than the frontiers of the US itself. They believe that they have to maintain the most powerful armed forces in the world so as to be able to ward off threats to these interests, whether from genuine national liber¬ation movements, from Russian moves, or from the other Western capitalisms taking measures that would damage the functioning of the US multinationals and banks (for instance, through pro¬tectionist measures).
This basic military drive is reinforced by subordinate factors: by the way in which over 30 years the cost of maintaining this huge military apparatus has been partially offset by its effect of stabilising the civilian economy and lessening the severity of economic crises; and by the way in which key firms and powerful bureaucratic sectors within the armed forces and the Pentagon gain as against other parts of the ruling class from the scale of the arms effort.
But the US does not operate as the only force in world affairs. Thompson quite rightly dismisses those who would see US imperialism as the only cause of missile madness. But he does not comprehend how Russia has developed an imperialist drive of its own. And so he can conclude imperialism -is not the cause of the arms race.
Yet if we look closely at the way in which Russian society has developed since the late 1920s it is easy to see how an imperialist drive has developed symmetrical to that of the Western powers. When the group around Stalin took complete control of Russia, they set themselves the task of defending that control by developing a military apparatus as powerful as that of any potential foe. But that was only possible on the basis of imitating in Russia much of the basis of the Western military potential - building up heavy industry through squeezing the living standards of workers and peasants arid, ploughing the excess value so obtained into accumulation. But once such methods were adopted, it was logical to copy the West in other ways as well — to reach out beyond the USSR's borders for further resources for accumulation. Hence the division of Poland with Hitler in 1939, the division of the whole of Europe with Churchill and Roosevelt in 1944-45, the move into Afghanistan last December.
Accumulation in order to match the arms potential of a rival is an endless process. Every success in expanding the industrial base or armaments only spurs the rival to do the same. The arms budget has to be increased in order to hold together a ramshackle empire already groaning under the consequences (the shortages of food and consumer goods) of the existing arms burden.
Yet to relax, to let the arms pro¬gramme slow down, is to risk being humiliated by the opponent at one or other point of confrontation, and to see allies switch sides, clients regain their independence, semi-colonies rebel.
And so the mere possibility that the opponent might develop some new form of weaponry compels one to do the same. Just as in economic competi¬tion as seen by Marx, the accumulation of means of production is necessary, regardless of the individual desires of capitalists, so in military competition, accumulation of arms — and the economic potential to make them — is necessary, even if both sides can see that ultimately it is going to destroy them. But, of course, the individual desires of capitalists do come to be identified with accumulation — the system provides the appropriate psycho¬logical and ideological mechanisms to keep itself functioning. The bureau¬cracies of the state and industry which participate in the accumulation of arms become so structured that the individuals in them see that as a good thing in itself. In both the Pentagon and in the great firm that is USSR Ltd powerfully placed bureaucrats see their own career pros¬pects as identified in further enlarging the military-industrial structure.
The continual expansion of military might feeds back into each protagonist, just as 'pure economic competition' would, forcing each ruling class to tighten its grip over subordinate classes,forcing each to broaden still further the base of its arms potential by spreading still more beyond its borders, creating still more interests in each society intimately bound up with the pursuit of further military expansion, even to the point where the demand of the military on resources pushes society as a whole into the deepest instability.
Cold War and Crisis
This leads to a final point of analysis where we part company with Thompson. His account of the new Cold War cut it right off from an important element determining its course — the existence or otherwise of economic crisis.
The point can be put like this. Until the mid-1940s it seemed that the Western imperialisms could not coexist on the face of the earth without continual recourse to war with each other. But the antagonisms that had produced the First and Second World Wars were soon forgotten in the boom conditions of the 1950s and 1960s. The whole world economy was expanding, and the different powers could share in the prosperity without stepping on each other's toes.
As between the various Western powers and Russia things were more difficult. Although the division of Europe was agreed in 1944-45 and adhered to, with respect to the rest of the world there were problems. It was by no means clear what the real balance of forces was because of the number of unknown factors (the effects of the colonial revolution, the Chinese revolution, the then higher growth rate of the USSR, etc.). However, by the early 1960s, something like a stable balance of forces seemed to exist. The basis was laid for 'detente'.
One of the things that has reactivated the old antagonisms has been the effect of economic crisis in both 'camps'. Both great powers have been faced with an increased need to deploy resources outside their own national frontiers at the same time as there has been a destabilisation of the foreign countries in which these resources are located.
In the case of the West there has been the massive growth of the international credit system (Eurodollars and Petro¬dollars) and the increased pressure to internationalisation of production (the 'world car', for example). But this has been accompanied by increased tensions among the advanced powers (the continual pressures for import controls against each other's goods, the attempts of Germany and France to play an independent role in international affairs) and by the creation of whole zones of instability in the rest of the world (especially the Middle East, but also Central America and the Caribbean).
In the case of the Eastern bloc the Russians have found the Chinese openly aligned with the West, have lost Egypt to the US camp, see Iraq changing sides, are having difficulties cqnsolidating their hold on Afghanistan and fear new rumblings in Eastern Europe — all at a time when they are more dependent than ever before on their economic ties with the West and the Third World.
Both sides find themselves with economic problems that create dissent among allies, clients and semi-colonies. Both fear the other will exploit these to its own advantage. And so both attempt to increase the number of their warheads, to raise the accuracy of their missiles, to prepare to threaten the other with 'limited' nuclear war if it intervenes in the wrong 'sphere of influence'.
Theory and Practice
The analysis of the world put forward above does not contradict Thompson completely. On many points there is concurrence. But the practical con¬clusions that follow are very different.
For Thompson the struggle against the missiles is the struggle, the resolution of which must be achieved before we can deal with other issues (with taking on the 'armourers and the gaolers'). For us it is a struggle that intersects with many other struggles over many other issues.
This is fantastically important. CND last time round was very successful in mobilising numbers of people. But in the end it failed. It did not get rid of the bomb and most of the activists moved on to other things: Thompson himself, for example, stopped campaigning and started writing (very good) history.
Failure was not the result of lack of effort. It was because, essentially, CND did not gather behind it a social force that could break the grip of the bomb makers. And that was because it was cut off from the everyday pre¬occupations of the great majority of people. Trade union leaders like Frank Cousins of the TGWU could cast bloc votes for CND. A Labour Party conference could even pass a resolution against the bomb. But neither enough TGWU members nor sufficient Labour Party supporters cared about the issue to enforce implementation of the resolution or blacking of nuclear bases. When, later, we sat down in the streets in an effort to get our way through direct action, we soon learnt it was powerless, because we, by ourselves, were not a social force.
The impotence of CND was some¬thing that had been experienced by anti¬war movements before.
Take, for example, the experience of the First World War. Ultimately that war ended because first the Russian and then the German workers and soldiers would endure it no more. But for long years before that the anti-war move¬ment was isolated, on the margins of society, unable to influence events. One of the most important worker leaders of the German revolution, Richard Muller, later explained why. He tells how the most virulent opponents of the war (organised in the Internationale group¬ing) remained cut off from the workers in the big Berlin factories. These workers were fairly hostile to the war, but it seemed something remote from them until it led to direct attacks on their living standards and their trade union rights.
To build up a movement in the factories capable of action took four years of slow, relentless work by Muller and his comrades. By contrast the anti¬war socialists outside the factories called repeatedly for demonstrative actions which could only appeal to small 'vanguard groups' of workers, easily dealt with by the military and the police'. There had to be a unification of the anti-war sentiment and the struggle over material conditions before there could develop a force powerful enough to crack the regime and the war.
One of the problems for CND in the late 1950s and early 1960s was that the material conditions were not such as to make possible such a unification of the 'economic' and the 'political'. Most workers could still look forward to rising real living standards year after year, unemployment was less than two per cent, the welfare state was still expanding.
Today things are different, precisely because the new surge of nuclear missiles is linked with the trend towards inter¬national crisis. The increase in arms spending takes place at the same time as the cuts in schools, hospitals and hous¬ing; the militarisation of society takes place as workers engaged in traditionally 'peaceful' trade union practices find themselves up against the forces of the state; the growth of the new anti-bomb movement takes place as the retiring head of the Supplementary Benefits Commission warns of the 'danger' of the unemployed rioting in the streets.
Yet Thompson virtually ignores all this. For him the way forward is to repeat the movement the last time round, with bigger numbers of essenti¬ally the same sorts of people. It is a recipe for unnecessary failure.
Thompson is not clear on another thing of immense importance — whether we are going to have to seize the weapons of destruction from the hands of our rulers, or whether all we have to do is peacefully persuade them of the folly of their ways. At times his tone is one of confrontation. But at others it seems we only have to point to an 'alternative logic'.
This is not surprising, since the very sort of people he sees as constituting the core of the movement would run a hundred miles at the very thought of real confrontation. Just look at his pro¬posed allies. 'The churches' — are the archbishops and cardinals en masse go¬ing to lead an assault on the missile bases? 'The Eurocommunists' — when, as Edward Thompson well knows, the Italian Communist Party leaders have argued against Italy leaving NATO, the Spanish Communists do not argue for an ending of Spain's alliance with the US, least that should 'destabilise' the international situation, and the French Communist Party is the most enthusiastic supporter of the French nuclear Force de Frappe. The 'Labourites', if by this Thompson means the leading Labour lefts, then it should be remembered that it was only two years ago that then-star was threatening the use of troops to break a strike at Windscale. Even the category of 'trade unionists' is ambiguous: does it mean those at the base, or those leaders who spend much of their time trying to stop strikes in places like the naval dockyard where the nuclear submarines are fitted out?
Thompson has drawn up a list of people who might — on occasions — put their names to anti-missile petitions. He has not located a coherent force that will fight to dismantle the missiles, regardless of the consequences.
The deployment of nuclear warheads is integral to the society in which v live, capitalism. The more people arc enmeshed in the higher structures ' that society, the more they resist any thitlg w'hi'ch threatens to overturn that society — even if such an overturn is necessary to stop it leading humanity to annihilation. They might sign letters to The Times; they will run in fear of riot. They may clap politely at a public meeting; they will shudder at the thought of social upheaval. They may distribute the odd leaflet; they will hide if the leaflet leads to real conflict.
This is not an argument for putting up a sign at anti-nuclear meetings: 'Workers Only'. It is an argument for developing strategies aimed at sections of society who are not so tied to existing structures as those who have pride of place in Thompson's vision. The missiles do threaten the future of the individual members of all classes. But the question is: how many of them can be won to a strategy not just of token opposition, but of active struggle?
And here it has to be recognised that the stockbroker who wants to fight the bomb has to look to a movement that will destroy his profits, the priest to a break with his own church, the Euro-communist to a fight against party leaders who tolerate the weaponry of destruction, the Labourite to a battle with left figures who oppose bombs in opposition only to preside over their construction when in office.
In this sense, the bomb is a class issue. There are those whose class interests lead them to accept the threat to humanity (including themselves). And there are those whose class interests point in the opposite direction, who even if they have been conned into accepting the bomb can find themselves bitterly fighting the bomb makers over other issues. A really successful move¬ment can win individuals from the first group. But only if it makes them break with that group to build among the second. Thompson with his near-mystical incantation of terms like 'exterminism' and his grandiose verbiage about 'broad movements' obscures this essential fact.
Bolshevism in the Age of the Bomb
Politics is not just about theoretical analysis or even strategy. It is also about getting things done, about the organisational forms that can turn theory into practice. What should these be in the era of missile madness?
For Thompson — and no doubt for many other people in the new movement — the sheer horror of what themissiles can do means dropping thetraditional forms of organisation adoptedby Marxists, especially the notion of adisciplined revolutionary workers' party. All that is needed, it is argued, is thebroadest possible alliance. But beforeanyone goes along with Thompson onthis they should reflect on one thing: it was precisely the way in which capitalism produced an earlier version of militaristic horror (that of trench warfare and poisonous gas) that led the most consistently anti-war socialists to adopt a precise organisational form,that to be found in the notion of-the
'Bolshevik Party'.
The idea of such a party certainly was not adopted because of any obsession with orthodoxy. When first broached it was a most" unorthodox innovation. People found out the hard way it was what they needed as they struggled against what was (at that point) the most horrendous war in human history.
A Gramsci, a Big Bill Heywood, a Eugene Levine, an Alfred Rosmer, a John MacLean a John Read, even, at the very end, a Rosa Luxemburg, came to see that the only way to cope with capitalism in the era of world wars was to build a party of the sort that had been pioneered in the struggle against Czarist despotism in Russia. Why did they come to this conclusion?
Until 1914 opposition to the differ¬ent aspects of capitalist society tended to flow into different channels. There was a trade unionism that was concerned chiefly (when it even did that) with the wage rates and working conditions of workers with particular skills. There was a 'political' socialism that only con¬cerned itself with making propaganda and collecting votes. There was a pacifism that only made ineffectual protests against participation in wars. There was a feminism which restricted itself to fighting the legal disabilities facing women.
The war threw each and everyone of these currents into disarray. Trade unionists turned against one another as the state offered privileges to those union leaders who would support its war effort and prison sentences to those militants who resisted. The 'political' socialists had the choice of acting as a left front for militarism or continuing in the most difficult conditions with propagandism that seemed ineffectual against searing bullets and burning flesh. The pacifists were either converted to instant patriotism, or made individual protests which eased consciences but could not stop the carnage. The feminists split between those who saw 'equality' as meaning an equal right to suffer in the trenches, and those asserted that it meant an equal part in the fight to turn the guns against the generals.
What was different about the party that had grown up around Lenin in Russia was that it showed that impotence could be overcome by Unking the different struggles.Trade unionism which cut itself off from the struggle against other aspects of capitalism (militarism, despotism, discrimination against minori¬ties and women) left intact a system that would not only recoup any con¬cessions it made over living standards but which would threaten life itself: this was the import of Lenin's famous attacks upon 'economism'. Socialism which put its faith in pamphlets and ballot boxes alone talked about a future that was already being destroyed in the present. Pacifism which preached peace without locating a force that could seize from the militarists control of the means of waging war merely created the illusion that the blood pouring from capitalism's every pore was an accident.
By contrast a socialism that was rooted in the day-to-day struggles in the factories was wrestling for control of the future in the here and now; an opposition to the war that based itself on strik©s*i©«er living standards, working conditions and trade union rights did not merely pray for an end to blood¬shed, but made it more difficult for the Haigs and the Hindenbergs to keep the bloodletting going.
This did not mean barring from the factory struggles those who did not believe in revolution, or from the anti¬war demonstrations those who accepted private property. But it did mean creat¬ing a party which would educate, agitate, organise within each of these wider movements for the connections to be made, for the strikes against food shortages to become strikes against the militarists, for the demonstrations against the war to be demonstrations against the system that created the war.
The party had to be 'of a new sort'. No longer concerned just with propa¬ganda or vote catching. No longer delegating to 'trade unionists' alone responsibility for agitation in the fac¬tory. But itself obsessed with action, above all action in the workplaces, and structured in such a way as to make action effective.
The question of building such parties was absolutely central because of the way 'peaceful' capitalist competition for markets had given way to war and the preparation for war. Ruling classes who hurled millions of armed men against each other would not recoil from murdering and imprisoning socialists who tried to stand in their path: the fates of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Levine, Joe Hill, Connolly, Gramsci, MacLean bear witness to that. Parties were needed that could operate as peaceful protest became civil war, as legality gave way to illegality. Those who had already pre¬sided over 20 million deaths were not going to_ be stopped unless for every bullet they fired bullets were fired back from a thousand factories. And that had to be organised.
It would be utter folly to believe that it needs a lesser social force, a lower level of organisation, to deal with those who are prepared to contemplate the destruction of humanity than those who 'merely' sent a generation of young men to die in the trenches.
One of the major themes running through Socialist Review over the last nine months has been the drive towards a new Cold War. We have insisted that it is a prime duty of socialists to resist this, and we have attempted to provide the arguments they need.
Until recently, however, our assumption was that we would be very much on the defensive over the question. The media were putting out a deluge of Cold War propaganda. There seemed to be no wider movement of resistance from which we could get support.
Over the summer, however, things have begun to change. The anti-bomb movement has suddenly taken on a new lease of life. From many different parts of the country come reports of very large public meetings, and of sizeable demonstrations, leading up to in what looks like being a very big protest in London on 26 October.
At the heart of the revived movement has been the historian E.P. Thompson. In articles in The Guardian and the New Statesman, in the pamphlet Protest and Survive, and in scores of public meetings, he has polemicised brilliantly against the Cruise missile. He has not been alone in putting the arguments. But it has been Thompson more than anyone else who has brought the movement back to life. And all credit is due to him for doing so.
It has also been Thompson who has provided whatever analysis the new movement has of the drive towards
Missile madness and of a strategy for combating it.
It is here that we in Socialist Review (and the SWP generally) have to dissent from what Thompson says.
Thompson's strategy is, quite simply, to arouse the largest possible numbers of people to protest at the decision to deploy the Cruise missiles:
'We must generate an alternative logic, an opposition at every level of society. The opposition must be international and must win the support of multitudes. It must bring its influence to bear upon the rulers of the world.' (Protest and Survive) Who is to make up this opposition? The impression you get from reading Protest and Survive is that Thompson is looking essentially for the same sort of people who made up CND 20 years ago and who turned out in considerable numbers to the public meetings over the summer — the articulate middle classes, people with university degrees, or pos¬sibly studying for them.
'As it happens the major bases (for the Cruise missiles) are to be placed in close proximity to the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and it seems to me that useful work can be done from these old bases of European civilisation. There will be work of research, of publication, and also work of conscience, all of which is very suitable for scholars... Oxford and Cambridge then are privileged toinitiate this campaign.' But it can involve:
'Any existing institution or even individual, universities and colleges — or groups within them — trade unionists, women's organisations, members of professions, churches, practitioners of Esperanto or chess...' With these:
'Before long we will be crossing frontiers..., bursting open bureau¬crats' doors, making the telephone tappers spin in their hideaways...and breaking up all the old stoney Stalinist reflexes of the East by forc¬ing open dialogue and debate...' If this were all that Thompson were arguing, we would be tempted to make a few words of protest. Even on the basis of purely arithmetic calculation it seems a bit strange to give no more prominence to 12 million trade union¬ists than to the half a million members of professions, the two million church¬goers or the 45,000 university dons — particularly when all the emphasis is on the dons.
But Thompson does not end his argument there. Underlying his com¬ments in Protest and Survive is a wide reaching attempt at analysis of the new Cold War dedicated to refuting the notion that 'the bomb is a class issue*.This is most openly argued by him in a recent issue of New Left Review.
The burden of Thompson's analysis is that society East and West has reached a new and terrifying stage in its develop¬ment — Exterminism.
'Exterminism designates those charac¬teristics of a society which thrust it in the direction whose outcome must be the extermination of millions...' It results from 'the accumulation and perfection of the means of extermination and the structuring of whole societies so that these will be directed towards that end,'
The factors which gave rise to 'exterminism' may once have been imperialist interests or the pursuit of profit by military-industrial complexes. But the methods used initially by ruling classes in the rational pursuit of their interests have taken on an irrational life of their own and are no longer reducible to their original courses.
'What originated as reaction becomesdirection. What isjustified by rationalself-interest by one power or the otherbecomes in the collison of the two,irrational. We are confronted withthe accumulated logic of process.'To treat this outcome as the productof 'rational' choices by ruling classes is'to impose a consequential rationalityupon an 'irrational' object.
Exterminism has to be challenged by the presentation of an 'alternative' logic, by:
'Initiating a counter logic, a thrust of process leading towards the dis¬solution of both blocs, the demystifi-cation of exterminism's ideological mythology.'
It is this which has to be achieved by the alliance of 'churches, Eurocommunists, Labourites, East European dissidents (and not only "dissidents")... trade unionists, ecologists...' As 'the blocs' swing 'off their collision course', 'the armourers and the police will lose their authority.'
Any talk of the bomb as a 'class issue' makes these tasks more difficult.'Class struggle continues in many forms across the globe. But exterminism itself is not a "class issue": it is a human issue.'
'Revolutionary posturing', Thompson insists, can only 'carry division into the necessary alliance of human resistance — indeed, worse than that, it can inflame exterminist ideology.' 'It should go without saying that exterminism can only be confronted by the broadest popular alliance, that is, by every affirmative resource in our culture.'
The analysisIs 'exterminism' something so entirely new in its irrationality?
The picture Thompson paints of rival blocs, each ruled by elites impris¬oned by the pressures of the military competition between them is correct. But it is by no means something out¬side the scope of old Marxist methods of class analysis.
Back in 1844 when Marx began to develop his ideas, he took over the notion of 'alienation' from the philo¬sophers Hegel and Feuerbach. He observed that in capitalist society the activity of people on the world becomes something separated from them, takes on a life of its own and comes to domi¬nate them.
'The object which labour produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer ...The more the worker spends him¬self, the more powerful the alien world becomes which he creates over against himself ...The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to himself but to his object.'
But for the young Marx it was not only the worker who became imprisoned in this 'alien' world beyond his or her control. So did the capitalist: he was alienated as well, even though he was 'happy in his alienation'.
The point of Marx's later work — especially Capital, was precisely to work out the way in which 'objective laws' came into existence that controlled this world of 'alienated labour'. Marx showed how the ability of the capitalist to extract surplus value from the workers at the point of production put a con¬tinual constraint on both the worker and the capitalist. The harder the worker works, the more wealth he creates for the capitalist. This wealth can then- be used to expand the productive forces at the disposal of the capitalist, to employ more workers and to create still more wealth for capital. The very labour of the worker has created the chains (even if the worker is well paid and they are 'golden chains') which tie him or her to endless production.
But the capitalist too is a prisoner. The very fact that exploitation and accumulation is possible for one capitalist makes it obligatory on all capitalists. Any capitalist who does not exploit in order to accumulate and accumulate in order to exploit will be driven out of business.
Yet, Marx went on to argue, the capitalist is doomed by the very world of alienated labour in which he thrives. The compulsion to endless accumu¬lation regardless of the consequences leads, in the short term, to repeated economic crises in which many capital¬ists go bankrupt. And in the long term it drives the whole capitalist system to economic stagnation, political chaos and social turmoil which in the end dooms the capitalist class, facing it either with socialist revolution or 'the mutual destruction of the contending classes'.
This did not mean that capitalists individually or as a class could be made to see sense and behave differently by reading Capital. Any capitalist who tried to do so would be driven out of business by the others. And so the ruling class necessarily identified the continuation of society as they knew it, of what they saw as 'civilisation', with enthusiastic imposition of measures that could only end by destroying that society. Only the violence of an insurg¬ent working class could make them step aside and allow the reorganisation of society on a rational basis.
Marx's analysis of the effects of 'peaceful' competition for markets might seem a far cry from the world of Cruise and Perishing. But in 1915 and 1916 the analysis was expanded to explain the bitter, bloody and apparently pointless war which had the great nations of Europe locked in combat, rapidly threatening to tear all of them apart.
Imperialism and 'Exterminism'
There was already one attempt at explanation of the war — expounded chiefly by the German socialist, Karl Kautsky — that went something like this:
The war was not at all in the interests of the great majority of capitalists on either side. They had been conned into believing by a minority of arms manu¬facturers that only through war could they defend their capitalist interests in the colonies. But in reality it would be the easiest thing in the world for the different capitalist powers to meet together and agree jointly to exploit the colonies. And so the war could be ended merely by bringing pressure to bear on capitalists to behave differently (or, as Thompson might have put it, to pursue 'an alternative logic').
This account of the war was challenged by the Bolshevik theorists, Bukharin and Lenin. Some aspects of Lenin's analysis of imperialism may not have stood the test of time. But in it, and even more so in Bukarin's Imperial¬ism are accounts of the 'logic' that produced World War One. And these can still throw much light on 'exterminism' today.
Lenin and Bukharin insisted that the development of capitalism leads to military competition complementing and even taking over from peaceful competition for markets.
For, as capitalism grows older two apparently contradictory things happen. On the one hand, within each country there is a concentration of economic power into fewer and fewer giant firms, increasingly integrated into state. Yet at the same time, the growing scale of pro¬duction means it can no longer be con¬tained within the narrow boundaries within which existing states operate.
The only way the contradiction can be resolved is if the national state can extend its powers beyond these boundaries within which existing states operate.
The only way the contradiction can be resolved is if the national state can extend its powers beyond these boundaries. It has to build up its armies, its navies, its airforces, its weaponry, so as to be able to safeguard markets, production facilities and raw material resources that exist abroad. This means annexing some territories, establishing spheres of influence over others, forcibly pressurising the rulers of the rest to safeguard its interests.
'The struggle between state capitalist trusts is decided in the first place by the relation between their military forces, for the military power of the country is the last resort of the struggling "national" groups of capitalists,' wrote Bukharin in 1916.
'The capitalists partition the world, not out of personal malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to get profits,' Lenin insisted a year later. But any partition could only be agreed on by all of them for a short period of time, since as some of them grew economically more quickly than others the military balance between the powers would shift and the stronger ones would demand a larger share of the world.
Under such circumstances, periods of peace 'inevitably can only be "breathing spells" between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the way for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars.'
Bukharin spelt the argument out again in 1921 in his Economics of the Transformation Period.
'The anarchy of world capitalism — the opposition between social world labour and "national" state appropriation — expresses itself in the collision of the state organisations and in capitalist wars... 'War is nothing other than the method of competition at a specific level of development...The method of competition between state capital¬ist trusts...'
Just as economic competition has a logic of its own, so Lenin and Bukharin argued the military competition does. Lenin observed that imperialism was characterised not just by the seizure of areas necessary to the national economy but areas which might strengthen the rural power if it possessed them and areas of importance from the point of view of military strategy. And Bukharin noted that the militarist structure of the state arose from the 'economic base', but like every "superstructure" reacted back on the base and moulded it in a certain direction.'
The point of this discussion of Marx, Lenin and Bukharin is not to show that Thompson has infringed some 'orthodoxy'. It is rather to emphasise that that he sees as completely new developments, right outside the perspectives of classic Marxism, are exactly the sorts of things that classic Marxism was trying to explain. Competition between manufactured products gave rise to competition between those fairly nasty classes of manufactured objects, Dreadnoughts, machine guns and poisonous gases and that in turn gave rise to competition between the most horrendous of manu¬factured objects, intercontinental ballis¬tic missiles and nuclear bombs. The level of alienation is raised to an incredible degree; the physical future of all members of all classes is put at risk. But all on the basis of the 'world of alienated labour', the capitalist relations of pro¬duction.
The Logic of the Cold War
Let's look briefly at what motivates the major protagonists of the Cold War.
The facts about the expansion of the interests of US capitalism beyond its national boundaries are well known: it controls about half the productive wealth of the world; firms like Ford or General Motors or the oil giants operate productive facilities in scores of countries; US investments overseas produce more output than any single country apart from the US itself and the USSR; the US banks receive the lion's share of the 88bn dollars a year which develop¬ing countries have to pay out on debt servicing each year. The point has been reached where the viability of almost all of the major US industrial corporations and banks depends upon maintaining intact integrated complexes of components operations throughout the 'free world': the great banks could be brought to their knees if one of the great debtor nations defaulted, even Ford would have gone bankrupt in the last couple of years but for its overseas operations.
Under such circumstances the rulers of the US see the frontiers of their vital interests as much wider than the frontiers of the US itself. They believe that they have to maintain the most powerful armed forces in the world so as to be able to ward off threats to these interests, whether from genuine national liber¬ation movements, from Russian moves, or from the other Western capitalisms taking measures that would damage the functioning of the US multinationals and banks (for instance, through pro¬tectionist measures).
This basic military drive is reinforced by subordinate factors: by the way in which over 30 years the cost of maintaining this huge military apparatus has been partially offset by its effect of stabilising the civilian economy and lessening the severity of economic crises; and by the way in which key firms and powerful bureaucratic sectors within the armed forces and the Pentagon gain as against other parts of the ruling class from the scale of the arms effort.
But the US does not operate as the only force in world affairs. Thompson quite rightly dismisses those who would see US imperialism as the only cause of missile madness. But he does not comprehend how Russia has developed an imperialist drive of its own. And so he can conclude imperialism -is not the cause of the arms race.
Yet if we look closely at the way in which Russian society has developed since the late 1920s it is easy to see how an imperialist drive has developed symmetrical to that of the Western powers. When the group around Stalin took complete control of Russia, they set themselves the task of defending that control by developing a military apparatus as powerful as that of any potential foe. But that was only possible on the basis of imitating in Russia much of the basis of the Western military potential - building up heavy industry through squeezing the living standards of workers and peasants arid, ploughing the excess value so obtained into accumulation. But once such methods were adopted, it was logical to copy the West in other ways as well — to reach out beyond the USSR's borders for further resources for accumulation. Hence the division of Poland with Hitler in 1939, the division of the whole of Europe with Churchill and Roosevelt in 1944-45, the move into Afghanistan last December.
Accumulation in order to match the arms potential of a rival is an endless process. Every success in expanding the industrial base or armaments only spurs the rival to do the same. The arms budget has to be increased in order to hold together a ramshackle empire already groaning under the consequences (the shortages of food and consumer goods) of the existing arms burden.
Yet to relax, to let the arms pro¬gramme slow down, is to risk being humiliated by the opponent at one or other point of confrontation, and to see allies switch sides, clients regain their independence, semi-colonies rebel.
And so the mere possibility that the opponent might develop some new form of weaponry compels one to do the same. Just as in economic competi¬tion as seen by Marx, the accumulation of means of production is necessary, regardless of the individual desires of capitalists, so in military competition, accumulation of arms — and the economic potential to make them — is necessary, even if both sides can see that ultimately it is going to destroy them. But, of course, the individual desires of capitalists do come to be identified with accumulation — the system provides the appropriate psycho¬logical and ideological mechanisms to keep itself functioning. The bureau¬cracies of the state and industry which participate in the accumulation of arms become so structured that the individuals in them see that as a good thing in itself. In both the Pentagon and in the great firm that is USSR Ltd powerfully placed bureaucrats see their own career pros¬pects as identified in further enlarging the military-industrial structure.
The continual expansion of military might feeds back into each protagonist, just as 'pure economic competition' would, forcing each ruling class to tighten its grip over subordinate classes,forcing each to broaden still further the base of its arms potential by spreading still more beyond its borders, creating still more interests in each society intimately bound up with the pursuit of further military expansion, even to the point where the demand of the military on resources pushes society as a whole into the deepest instability.
Cold War and Crisis
This leads to a final point of analysis where we part company with Thompson. His account of the new Cold War cut it right off from an important element determining its course — the existence or otherwise of economic crisis.
The point can be put like this. Until the mid-1940s it seemed that the Western imperialisms could not coexist on the face of the earth without continual recourse to war with each other. But the antagonisms that had produced the First and Second World Wars were soon forgotten in the boom conditions of the 1950s and 1960s. The whole world economy was expanding, and the different powers could share in the prosperity without stepping on each other's toes.
As between the various Western powers and Russia things were more difficult. Although the division of Europe was agreed in 1944-45 and adhered to, with respect to the rest of the world there were problems. It was by no means clear what the real balance of forces was because of the number of unknown factors (the effects of the colonial revolution, the Chinese revolution, the then higher growth rate of the USSR, etc.). However, by the early 1960s, something like a stable balance of forces seemed to exist. The basis was laid for 'detente'.
One of the things that has reactivated the old antagonisms has been the effect of economic crisis in both 'camps'. Both great powers have been faced with an increased need to deploy resources outside their own national frontiers at the same time as there has been a destabilisation of the foreign countries in which these resources are located.
In the case of the West there has been the massive growth of the international credit system (Eurodollars and Petro¬dollars) and the increased pressure to internationalisation of production (the 'world car', for example). But this has been accompanied by increased tensions among the advanced powers (the continual pressures for import controls against each other's goods, the attempts of Germany and France to play an independent role in international affairs) and by the creation of whole zones of instability in the rest of the world (especially the Middle East, but also Central America and the Caribbean).
In the case of the Eastern bloc the Russians have found the Chinese openly aligned with the West, have lost Egypt to the US camp, see Iraq changing sides, are having difficulties cqnsolidating their hold on Afghanistan and fear new rumblings in Eastern Europe — all at a time when they are more dependent than ever before on their economic ties with the West and the Third World.
Both sides find themselves with economic problems that create dissent among allies, clients and semi-colonies. Both fear the other will exploit these to its own advantage. And so both attempt to increase the number of their warheads, to raise the accuracy of their missiles, to prepare to threaten the other with 'limited' nuclear war if it intervenes in the wrong 'sphere of influence'.
Theory and Practice
The analysis of the world put forward above does not contradict Thompson completely. On many points there is concurrence. But the practical con¬clusions that follow are very different.
For Thompson the struggle against the missiles is the struggle, the resolution of which must be achieved before we can deal with other issues (with taking on the 'armourers and the gaolers'). For us it is a struggle that intersects with many other struggles over many other issues.
This is fantastically important. CND last time round was very successful in mobilising numbers of people. But in the end it failed. It did not get rid of the bomb and most of the activists moved on to other things: Thompson himself, for example, stopped campaigning and started writing (very good) history.
Failure was not the result of lack of effort. It was because, essentially, CND did not gather behind it a social force that could break the grip of the bomb makers. And that was because it was cut off from the everyday pre¬occupations of the great majority of people. Trade union leaders like Frank Cousins of the TGWU could cast bloc votes for CND. A Labour Party conference could even pass a resolution against the bomb. But neither enough TGWU members nor sufficient Labour Party supporters cared about the issue to enforce implementation of the resolution or blacking of nuclear bases. When, later, we sat down in the streets in an effort to get our way through direct action, we soon learnt it was powerless, because we, by ourselves, were not a social force.
The impotence of CND was some¬thing that had been experienced by anti¬war movements before.
Take, for example, the experience of the First World War. Ultimately that war ended because first the Russian and then the German workers and soldiers would endure it no more. But for long years before that the anti-war move¬ment was isolated, on the margins of society, unable to influence events. One of the most important worker leaders of the German revolution, Richard Muller, later explained why. He tells how the most virulent opponents of the war (organised in the Internationale group¬ing) remained cut off from the workers in the big Berlin factories. These workers were fairly hostile to the war, but it seemed something remote from them until it led to direct attacks on their living standards and their trade union rights.
To build up a movement in the factories capable of action took four years of slow, relentless work by Muller and his comrades. By contrast the anti¬war socialists outside the factories called repeatedly for demonstrative actions which could only appeal to small 'vanguard groups' of workers, easily dealt with by the military and the police'. There had to be a unification of the anti-war sentiment and the struggle over material conditions before there could develop a force powerful enough to crack the regime and the war.
One of the problems for CND in the late 1950s and early 1960s was that the material conditions were not such as to make possible such a unification of the 'economic' and the 'political'. Most workers could still look forward to rising real living standards year after year, unemployment was less than two per cent, the welfare state was still expanding.
Today things are different, precisely because the new surge of nuclear missiles is linked with the trend towards inter¬national crisis. The increase in arms spending takes place at the same time as the cuts in schools, hospitals and hous¬ing; the militarisation of society takes place as workers engaged in traditionally 'peaceful' trade union practices find themselves up against the forces of the state; the growth of the new anti-bomb movement takes place as the retiring head of the Supplementary Benefits Commission warns of the 'danger' of the unemployed rioting in the streets.
Yet Thompson virtually ignores all this. For him the way forward is to repeat the movement the last time round, with bigger numbers of essenti¬ally the same sorts of people. It is a recipe for unnecessary failure.
Thompson is not clear on another thing of immense importance — whether we are going to have to seize the weapons of destruction from the hands of our rulers, or whether all we have to do is peacefully persuade them of the folly of their ways. At times his tone is one of confrontation. But at others it seems we only have to point to an 'alternative logic'.
This is not surprising, since the very sort of people he sees as constituting the core of the movement would run a hundred miles at the very thought of real confrontation. Just look at his pro¬posed allies. 'The churches' — are the archbishops and cardinals en masse go¬ing to lead an assault on the missile bases? 'The Eurocommunists' — when, as Edward Thompson well knows, the Italian Communist Party leaders have argued against Italy leaving NATO, the Spanish Communists do not argue for an ending of Spain's alliance with the US, least that should 'destabilise' the international situation, and the French Communist Party is the most enthusiastic supporter of the French nuclear Force de Frappe. The 'Labourites', if by this Thompson means the leading Labour lefts, then it should be remembered that it was only two years ago that then-star was threatening the use of troops to break a strike at Windscale. Even the category of 'trade unionists' is ambiguous: does it mean those at the base, or those leaders who spend much of their time trying to stop strikes in places like the naval dockyard where the nuclear submarines are fitted out?
Thompson has drawn up a list of people who might — on occasions — put their names to anti-missile petitions. He has not located a coherent force that will fight to dismantle the missiles, regardless of the consequences.
The deployment of nuclear warheads is integral to the society in which v live, capitalism. The more people arc enmeshed in the higher structures ' that society, the more they resist any thitlg w'hi'ch threatens to overturn that society — even if such an overturn is necessary to stop it leading humanity to annihilation. They might sign letters to The Times; they will run in fear of riot. They may clap politely at a public meeting; they will shudder at the thought of social upheaval. They may distribute the odd leaflet; they will hide if the leaflet leads to real conflict.
This is not an argument for putting up a sign at anti-nuclear meetings: 'Workers Only'. It is an argument for developing strategies aimed at sections of society who are not so tied to existing structures as those who have pride of place in Thompson's vision. The missiles do threaten the future of the individual members of all classes. But the question is: how many of them can be won to a strategy not just of token opposition, but of active struggle?
And here it has to be recognised that the stockbroker who wants to fight the bomb has to look to a movement that will destroy his profits, the priest to a break with his own church, the Euro-communist to a fight against party leaders who tolerate the weaponry of destruction, the Labourite to a battle with left figures who oppose bombs in opposition only to preside over their construction when in office.
In this sense, the bomb is a class issue. There are those whose class interests lead them to accept the threat to humanity (including themselves). And there are those whose class interests point in the opposite direction, who even if they have been conned into accepting the bomb can find themselves bitterly fighting the bomb makers over other issues. A really successful move¬ment can win individuals from the first group. But only if it makes them break with that group to build among the second. Thompson with his near-mystical incantation of terms like 'exterminism' and his grandiose verbiage about 'broad movements' obscures this essential fact.
Bolshevism in the Age of the Bomb
Politics is not just about theoretical analysis or even strategy. It is also about getting things done, about the organisational forms that can turn theory into practice. What should these be in the era of missile madness?
For Thompson — and no doubt for many other people in the new movement — the sheer horror of what themissiles can do means dropping thetraditional forms of organisation adoptedby Marxists, especially the notion of adisciplined revolutionary workers' party. All that is needed, it is argued, is thebroadest possible alliance. But beforeanyone goes along with Thompson onthis they should reflect on one thing: it was precisely the way in which capitalism produced an earlier version of militaristic horror (that of trench warfare and poisonous gas) that led the most consistently anti-war socialists to adopt a precise organisational form,that to be found in the notion of-the
'Bolshevik Party'.
The idea of such a party certainly was not adopted because of any obsession with orthodoxy. When first broached it was a most" unorthodox innovation. People found out the hard way it was what they needed as they struggled against what was (at that point) the most horrendous war in human history.
A Gramsci, a Big Bill Heywood, a Eugene Levine, an Alfred Rosmer, a John MacLean a John Read, even, at the very end, a Rosa Luxemburg, came to see that the only way to cope with capitalism in the era of world wars was to build a party of the sort that had been pioneered in the struggle against Czarist despotism in Russia. Why did they come to this conclusion?
Until 1914 opposition to the differ¬ent aspects of capitalist society tended to flow into different channels. There was a trade unionism that was concerned chiefly (when it even did that) with the wage rates and working conditions of workers with particular skills. There was a 'political' socialism that only con¬cerned itself with making propaganda and collecting votes. There was a pacifism that only made ineffectual protests against participation in wars. There was a feminism which restricted itself to fighting the legal disabilities facing women.
The war threw each and everyone of these currents into disarray. Trade unionists turned against one another as the state offered privileges to those union leaders who would support its war effort and prison sentences to those militants who resisted. The 'political' socialists had the choice of acting as a left front for militarism or continuing in the most difficult conditions with propagandism that seemed ineffectual against searing bullets and burning flesh. The pacifists were either converted to instant patriotism, or made individual protests which eased consciences but could not stop the carnage. The feminists split between those who saw 'equality' as meaning an equal right to suffer in the trenches, and those asserted that it meant an equal part in the fight to turn the guns against the generals.
What was different about the party that had grown up around Lenin in Russia was that it showed that impotence could be overcome by Unking the different struggles.Trade unionism which cut itself off from the struggle against other aspects of capitalism (militarism, despotism, discrimination against minori¬ties and women) left intact a system that would not only recoup any con¬cessions it made over living standards but which would threaten life itself: this was the import of Lenin's famous attacks upon 'economism'. Socialism which put its faith in pamphlets and ballot boxes alone talked about a future that was already being destroyed in the present. Pacifism which preached peace without locating a force that could seize from the militarists control of the means of waging war merely created the illusion that the blood pouring from capitalism's every pore was an accident.
By contrast a socialism that was rooted in the day-to-day struggles in the factories was wrestling for control of the future in the here and now; an opposition to the war that based itself on strik©s*i©«er living standards, working conditions and trade union rights did not merely pray for an end to blood¬shed, but made it more difficult for the Haigs and the Hindenbergs to keep the bloodletting going.
This did not mean barring from the factory struggles those who did not believe in revolution, or from the anti¬war demonstrations those who accepted private property. But it did mean creat¬ing a party which would educate, agitate, organise within each of these wider movements for the connections to be made, for the strikes against food shortages to become strikes against the militarists, for the demonstrations against the war to be demonstrations against the system that created the war.
The party had to be 'of a new sort'. No longer concerned just with propa¬ganda or vote catching. No longer delegating to 'trade unionists' alone responsibility for agitation in the fac¬tory. But itself obsessed with action, above all action in the workplaces, and structured in such a way as to make action effective.
The question of building such parties was absolutely central because of the way 'peaceful' capitalist competition for markets had given way to war and the preparation for war. Ruling classes who hurled millions of armed men against each other would not recoil from murdering and imprisoning socialists who tried to stand in their path: the fates of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Levine, Joe Hill, Connolly, Gramsci, MacLean bear witness to that. Parties were needed that could operate as peaceful protest became civil war, as legality gave way to illegality. Those who had already pre¬sided over 20 million deaths were not going to_ be stopped unless for every bullet they fired bullets were fired back from a thousand factories. And that had to be organised.
It would be utter folly to believe that it needs a lesser social force, a lower level of organisation, to deal with those who are prepared to contemplate the destruction of humanity than those who 'merely' sent a generation of young men to die in the trenches.
Crisis of the European revolutionary left 1979
The crisis of the European revolutionary left first appeared in International Socialism, second series, issue 4, spring 1979.
The European revolutionary left has been undergoing a general crisis for the last two and a half years. In country after country the largest organisations have been paralysed by political confusion, leading in many cases to splits, in some to complete disintegration.
The crisis first manifested itself in the country in which the revolutionary left grew to its greatest strength in the mid-1970s — Italy. At the height of its influence it claimed 30,000 adherents, three daily papers, dozens of radio stations, half a dozen MPs.
Then, in 1976, after the general elections of 20 June, each of the three major organisations plunged into crisis. The national secretary and a substantial minority of the leadership of Avanguardia Operaia split from that organisation on a programme that was at least semi-reformist. The two constituent parts of the PDUP-Manifesto organisation split apart — the minority eventually to join the majority of AO (to form Democrazia Proletaria), the majority to merge with the AO minority. And the third organisation, Lotta Continua consciously dissolved its organisation into the* wider 'movement', remaining only as a paper. (For a partial account in English of these events, see Italy 1977-8, published by Red Notes, henceforth cited as "Italy").
In France, the biggest revolutionary organisation (although not the one with the biggest base in the factories) the Fourth International's LCR has been divided down the middle on whether to move towards unity with the right wing 'Trotskyist' sect, the OCI (the 'Lambertists') arid has abandoned its daily paper. (The pro-Lambertist tendency got 38-5 per cent of the votes, the anti 39 per cent — Combate (Madrid) 8 February 1979). A smaller, but by no means insignificant organisation, the OCT, (formerly "Revolution"), which had apparently strengthened itself through fusion, promptly split losing about a third of its members and most of its momentum in 1977-8.
In Sweden the organisation Furbundet Kommunist has developed an orientation which mercilessly criticises its own past positions as 'leftist' and 'economist', and which calls for a 'left' government committed to 'structural reforms'. One of the leading figures of the Danish Kommunistisk Forbund, Bent Moos, has developed an orientation which points in the same direction.
In Spain what was one of the most rapidly growing organisations in 1976-7, the OK", underwent a series of traumatic crises in the period after the June 1977 elections: its general secretary, Fabrigas, who had been the dominating influence in the organisation, split to join the Catalan branch of the Socialist Party; successive splits to the 'left' took most of its activists in Barcelona, Zaragosa and the Balearic's; what remained then dissolved itself into the semi-Maoist Movimiento Communista after self criticism of he QIC's traditions by its leadership which denounced its past 'leftism', the theoretical influence on it of "Trotsky' and its failure to understand 'Marxism-Leninism', (see Acerca del Proceso de rectification by the Comite Federal de la OIC, 8 Nov 78, and, for the point of view of some members who split to the left. Las raziones de nuestra separation de la OIC, Zaragosa, S Nov 78). There are also reports (of unknown reliability) that the biggest Fourth International section, the (Spanish) I.CR. is plagued by many of the controversies that have been paralysing its French equivalent.
In Portugal, little seems to remain of the movement that could briefly outflank the CP to the left in 1975 and deliver 17 percent of th popular vote to Major Otelo da Carvalho in the presidential election of 1976.
It is important to stress that these political crises are far from destroying the international revolutionary left. The movement is still far bigger than it was a dozen years ago. As one Italian commentator has noted, the 'crisis of Marxism' has been a "crisis of growth' (Praxis, February 1979). Nevertheless, a crisis it is. It threatens to paralyse the activity of many tens of thousands of revolutionaries, and to stop advantage being taken of the many opportunities which exist for building a revolutionary current in the workplaces. An understanding of the roots of the crisis is essential to revolutionaries everywhere. Those who do not learn its lessons may well live to suffer them.
Background: The growth of the revolutionary left 1968- 76
The revolutionary left internationally emerged in the years 1967-69. Previously its numbers had been miniscule and its real impact tiny. In France its total membership before the May events was, at the outside, 2000; in Britain revolutionaries used to joke that any organisation that grew to the 500 mark was bound then to split and disintegrate; in Itaiythe future foundersof AC) were, asmembersof the Fourth International's (iruppi Communisti Revoluzionari so deeply embedded in the Communist Party as to be invisible; in Spain too the future components of the revolutionary left were still encapsulated in the CP, ETA, the Guevarist FLP or the Catholic workers' organisations. In the space of little more than a couple of years, these scarcely visible embryos were very vigorous and noisy, even if still small, intruders into the established political network.
In France and Italy it numbered tens of thousands of adherents by 1970; in Spain it had grown to roughly the same size by the death of Franco in 1975; and even in miserable Britain with its suffocating reformist traditions, the IS (now the SWP) could claim approaching 4(XX) adherents by the end of 1974.
But the growth of the revolutionary left was not a result of its own efforts alone. It was a reflection of more profound social and economic developments of those years. This was the period in which the long drawn out boom conditions of the 1950s and 1960s began to give way to the crisis conditions of the 1970s, the boom had as a by-product undercut many of the institutional forms the various European ruling classes had used to control the mass of the population: industrialisation in Southern Europe destroyed much of the peasantry and with it the ability of priests to dominate politics; the new, young, urban workers were not nearly as intimidated by the police as had been their rural parents; women ceased to be a force for conservatism as they too were sucked into industry (in Britain, only 21 -7 per cent of married women worked in 1951; by 1971 the figure was twice as high, 42-2 percent and by 1976 490 per cent).
What this meant was that in 1968 in France, in 1969 in Italy and in Spain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, movements could develop among whole layers of workers which the ruling class did not have the institutional means to check. Gaullism was impotent when faced with the May general strike in France; the formerly Catholic unions in France and Italy had veered away from control by the church; the children of the most fanatical supporters of Franco in the 1930s, the Carlists of Pamplona, waged an almost insurrectionary general strike in 1973.
In Northern Europe the process was rather different in form. But in Britain at least the outcome was somewhat similar — successive outbreaks of militant action over wages and in defence of shop floor organisation that the existing institutions seemed unable to control.
Unable to hold these movements in check, the various ruling classes all too often were tempted to use direct repression against them: the use of the CRS riot police by de Gaulle in France, the threatened military coups in Italy in the early 1970s, the inevitable intervention of the Civil Guards and the Armed Police into Spanish dustrial disputes under Franco; the increasing resort by the Heath government to the Special Patrol Group. But repression alone was rarely able to smash the new economic militancy. It usually only served to give it a new and a more political dimension.
A final, additional factor helped the revolutionary left to gain from this situation: what we in the IS referred to at the time as 'the vacuum on the left'. The reformist organisations were, by and large, incapable of reacting to the sudden upsurge in working class struggle and consciousness. Their whole political stance focussed their attention on what was happening within the established political structures; they saw the workers' movement as no more than a means for putting pressure on these; it was to be kept going by a routine round of activities, carefully supervised from above and never allowed to take on a life of its own.
For the Communist Parties, this still meant maintaining an inflexible, closed oppositional Stalinist stance which, however, never challenged the system; their 'strategy' was to bide their time until there was an electoral majority for a 'left government' in France and Italy, until a 'pacific' general strike brought about 'national reconciliation' in Spain, in Britain the perennial talk of 'left advance' and 'alternative economic policies'. Social democracy was in an even worse state: the French party had discredited itself by its support for the colonial war in Algeria and its participation in de Gaulle's 1958 government; the Italian party had lost support and credibility through participation in coalition government with the Christian democrats; the British party had disillusioned many of its own activists through its imposition of wage controls and its attempt to put legal constraints on the unions; the Spanish party was made up of exiles who seemed unable to stir themselves to build an underground organisation; and the Portuguese party barely existed until the early 1970s.
As workers were drawn into wages struggles, demonstrations, political strikes, occupations, the revolutionaries were often the only section of the left to respond to the possibilities. Suddenly, their leaflets and their papers were being enthusiastically accepted and read by at least some working class activists. There were occasions when they had only to raise their red banners, and thousands would march behind them. It was possible for groups that had built themselves from dozens to hundreds through participation in student struggles now to draw in thousands of workers.
Not all the revolutionary groups managed to grow: some were too tainted by the sectarianism that had inured them to isolation of the pre-1968 period, others fell so much in love with the student movement that they never bothered about the factories — they went on complaining of the dangers of 'economism' until it was too late for them to make their presence felt.
Yet, in general the revolutionary left could flourish. And its own political ideas did not seem to make much difference to its success or failure in doing so. So in Italy the dominant trend was semi-Maoist, whether with Lotta Continua or with Avanguardia Operaia; in Spain Maoists and Trotskyists alike flourished; in France three rival Trotskyist groups and the semi-Maoist OCT dominated the scene by the mid-7()s. In Britain it was the "state capitalist" IS (now the SWP) which became dominant.
The revolutionary left everywhere had grown from strength to strength in the six or seven years after 1968. Its expectation was that it would continue to grow from strength to strength.
In Britain, as we watched the miners bring down the Heath government, we waited for a massive accretion in our strength as, after a few months of 'honeymoon' with Labour, the working class movement would explode in a 'big bang'. In the SWP our formations were not as absurdly optimistic as those who wrote, in the Fourth International's paper Red Weekly, of 'the road to dual power'. Yet we did expect a rapid resurgence of struggle. 'A period of lull in the class struggle is inevitable. But such is the severity of the economic crisis that this 'honeymoon' between the trade unions and the Labour government will be much shorter than in 1964-6. 'This time it will be a matter of months not years' (IS National Committee Report, Internal Bulletin April 1974); even a 'rightist' oppositional grouping inside our organisation thought that the 'honeymoon' would end 'a little later rather than sooner, but it cannot be long delayed' (Document in April 1974 Internal Bulletin by Duncan Hallas, Jim Higgins, John Palmer, and Roger Protz).
And, in practice, we behaved as if the near exponential growth of the previous period was going to continue. The round of activities and meetings remained at the same tempo as in the upsurge years of 1969, 1971, 1972 and 1973-4. We set targets for paper sales and for membership that assumed that nothing had changed.
By European standards, we in Britain were profoundly conservative in our perspective in 1974. In Italy, in the run up to the June 1976 election, virtually the whole revolutionary left believed (1) that they would get a substantial vote and many MPs for their joint list, and (2) that the election would give rise to a 'left' government which would lead Italy into a rerun of the Chilean experience under Allende, but this time with a happy ending.
The same expectations were general in Spain in the period up to Franco's demise. The LCR spoke of a maturing prerevolutionary situation' (its mentor, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International had been speaking in this sense since 1969 — see its 'Curta' in Accion Communista no. 14, Nov 1972). And for their part 'Marxist-Leninist' organisations still talked of the need to take up the teachings of Mao Tse Tung and prepare for 'people's war'.
In-F ranee, the wild optimism that had existed in 1968 had died down in the early 1970s — and with it the influence of the various Maoist and spontaneist groups who had most embodied it. Nevertheless, sections of the revolutionary left continued to behave as if their actions alone could transform the political situation — as in 1973 when the LCR fell for a government provocation and battled it out for hours with a vast array of riot police protecting a miniscule fascist meeting. The optimism persisted in the illusion in 1976-78 that the election of a 'worker government' made up of the CP and the Socialist Party would produce a huge upturn in the class struggle. 'For a longer or shorter period . . . there would be a period of enthusiasm, or real mobilisation of the working class with enormous illusions.' (Alain Krivine, in Revolution 2 July '76). The same beliefs in the immense possibilities of the left taking office in France are repeated in Ernest Mandel's book on Eurocommunism.
The roots of the crisis: (I) The temporary restabilisation of bourgeois institutions
The expectations of the revolutionary left look absurd in retrospect. They did not seem so absurd at the time. For the first time since the 1920s new revolutionary organisations had grown up, independent of both Social Democracy and Stalinism, just as workers struggles were rising to new heights. And all this, just as capitalism plunged into by far its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.
Be that as it may, it was the failure of these expectations to find fulfillment that led straight into the crisis of the revolutionary left. In Italy the elections of 20 June 1976 failed either to produce a 'left government' or to give the revolutionary left more than a couple of per cent of the poll: within a month people were talking of a 'crisis of the revolutionary left'.
The revolutionary left failed to take account of several factors. The first was the adaptability of existing institutions, especially of the reformist organisations within the working class movement. We have seen how in 1968-9 the reformist parties and the unions failed to react to the sudden upsurge of struggle. But that paralysis did not last all that long. Even the ultra-rigid French CP did make some use of the May events, 'running to the front' in order to direct some of the energy into strengthening its base in the factories. The Italian CP was more adept at taking advantage of the new militancy of 1969. Under its influence the trade union bureaucracy created new, apparently democratic organisational forms, factory councils (roughly equivalent to shop stewards committees) in ordci in ih.m many of the best spontaneous militants in the factories into its orbit In Spain the CP's caution could leave it very much on the sidelines in great struggles like the Pamplona or Vitoria general strikes; but it was still capable of building the workers commissions into the most powerful and most respected union federation.
In Portugal, the Stalinist CP which had cheerfully broken strikes in the summer of 1474 and which had been among the first of the CPs to remove from its programme references to the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', was just as willing to take up an apparently militant stance after it had been removed from the government in the late summer of 1975.
In Italy, Spain and France the turn to 'Eurocommunism' was also in part an attempt to open the party up to new forces. Although its prime purpose was to reassure the local ruling classes that the CPs would not betray their interests to Moscow, it also enabled the leaders to say to a whole array of leftist intellectuals that there was room for them. A new climate of tolerance inside the parties was promised to those who would not have thought of joining in 1968-9.
However, the transformation of Stalinism was child's play compared with what took place in the case of social democracy.
In France the old Socialist Party, the SFIO, had received an ignominious 6 per cent of the votes in the 1969 presidential election. But after a series of manoeuvres it was reborn in a completely new-form in 1971. The new party made every possible attempt to stress its discontinuity with the old; its leader Francois Mitterand had never been a member of the old party and the new party did not shy away from a certain 'left wing' rhetoric reabsorbing many of the leaders of the left reformist PSLJ. It made great play of workers' participation and openly sought alliances with the Communist Party. It cultivated relations with the former Catholic union federation, the CFDT. which had gained a reputation for leftism' in 1968, rather than with the SFIO's old ally, the FO union federation (a Cold War split from the CGT with much of the reputation one would expect from such origins). The result was a remarkable renaissance for social democracy in France. It has not succeeded in taking over from the CP as being the party of the industrial proletariat: but its vote has overtaken that of the CP, and it claimed in 1976 to have 958 workplace cells.
In Portugal, a mixture of money from the ruling ( ierman social democrats and an ambiguous politics that seemed to mean all things to all people in 1974 (including in the first lew months alter the overthrow of fascism a willingness to be 'to the left' of the CI' on certain issues), enabled the Portuguese Socialist Party to rise out of nothing to become that country's biggest party. Here, however, its policies lost it most of its active support in the radical Southern part of the country by the autumn of 1975; its attempts to set up rival union federations to that of the Communists enjoyed little success outsidesthe white collar field — and there it had to work both with the openly bourgeois parties and with right wing Maoist sects.
The Soares phenomenon in Portugal was soon followed by the Gonzales phenomenon in Spain. Here again, money from West European social democracy, plus the media, plus a toleration of certain left phrases, enabled the Socialist Party, the PSOE, not only to grab more votes than the CP, but also to scoop its social democratic rivals, even where they had a better record of struggle than itself. It did manage to set up a credible union federation, the UGT, even though. this had played virtually no role in the underground struggle against Francoism.
In Britain, there has been no great regrowth of social democratic politics. That has been ruled out by the experience of Labour in power for 11 of the last 15 years. The Labour vote in February 1974 was the lowest since the 1930s, and the Labour party membership has been in continual decline for 25 years. Until a couple of years ago droves of activists were still leaving the party in disillusionment, although there are a few indications that this trend might have been reversed since.
However, in the first half of the seventies, the decline of political social democracy was paralleled by an increased flexibility on the part of the trade union bureaucracy. Union membership expanded and a number of key unions were taken over by figures associated with the 'broad left'. Union leaders consciously set out to develop mechanisms that would tie shop stewards more closely into the running of the union. The strikes of 1968-70 had tended to be unofficial; not so the great strikes of 1971-4.
Overall, the vacuum on the left was not nearly as marked by the mid-70s as it had been in the late 1960s. Institutions aimed at tying workers to bourgeois society had to a very large extent filled the void, and the revolutionary left began to find the going hard. So, for example, although the crisis for the revolutionary left did not break until 1976 in Italy, certain symptoms were visible in 1972-3. In Spain conditions were already ripe enough at the end of 1974 for two thirds of the membership of one of the semi-Maoist groups, Bandiera Roja, to rejoin the CP (ex-members of that group are central in the Eurocommunist wing of the party in Barcelona).
The roots of the crisis: (2) the attitude of workers
To recognise the considerable efforts made by reformists of all hues to integrate the new activism of workers is not, by itself, an explanation of why the revolutionary left found itself out in the cold after 1975-6. You also have to explain why workers were prepared to see their struggles restricted within the limits prescribed by the reformists. Why did the workers movement in Britain which had rejected wage controls in 1969 and 1972-4, accept them in 1975-78? Why did Spanish workers in general accept the pact of Moncloa? (The Spanish equivalent of the Social Contract). Why did Italian workers bow down before a Christian democrat government which had passive CP support? Why did Portuguese workers allow Social Democrat led governments to bring to an end the movement that had threatened the whole future of Portuguese capitalism in 1975?
There is one set of explanations for all these phenomena simply in terms of a 'new flowering of reformist illusions'. In the 1968-75 period, it is said, revolutionaries failed to understand the peculiar features of western society, with the strong commitment of its workers to democratic forms. Once you understand this, it is then argued, you can see that the left will never reach the widest layers of the working class unless it relates to the reformist organisations and is well established on the parliamentary terrain.
One version of this argument is, of course, that put by Eurocommunist refugees from the lecture halls of '68. A slightly more sophisticated version is contained in the 'left Eurocommunist' theories of thinkers like the former member of the leadership of the Spanish CP, Claudin, and one of II Manifesto's leaders in Italy, Magri. (For further details see the articles by Phil Spencer and Colin Barker in this issue of International Socialism). Even some of the revolutionary left has developed its own version of the theory; see for instance the various texts from the Fourth International in the last three or four years, e.g. Ernest Mandel's book on Eurocommunism.
Yet, despite its wide popularity, none of the various versions really fits the facts. For, the crisis of the revolutionary left has not been accompanied by any huge flowering of social democracy, Stalinism or Eurocommunism. The passing over to rformism of a few former would be revolutionaries is not the same thing as the growth of widespread belief within the working class that its redemption is at hand from reformist leaders.
In Britain, as mentioned above, the period of stagnation for the revolutionary left followed the lowest social democratic vote for 40 years. In Italy and France, the revolutionary left began to tear itself apart after an election in which the electoral hopes of reformists as well as revolutionaries received a battering. In Portugal, by the time the Soares government turned the tide against the revolution, it itself had very little solid support within the core working class areas (it is pure mythology to pretend, as some adherents of the Fourth International line do, that there were large working class demonstrations in its support in Lisbon in the autumn of 1975). Even in Spain , where one would expect 40 years of Francoism to have led workers to greet democratisation with enthusiasm, there are already signs of disillusionment with bourgeois democracy (for instance the large number of abstentions in the referendum on the constitution).
A 'growth of illusions in reformism' is, at best, a very inadequate explanation of the forces which derailed the hopes of the revolutionary left.
A better starting point is to be found in certain comments made by Trotsky in 1921 —at aprevious time when the first wild hopes of a new revolutionary movement seemed to have come to an impasse internationally. He made some acute observations on how the working class reacts to a sudden turn to the worse in the economic situation.
'The political effects of a crisis are determined by the entire political situation and by those events which precede and accompany the crisis, especially the battles, successes or failures of the working class itself prior to the crisis. Under one set of circumstances the crisis might give a mighty impulse to the revolutionary activity of the working masses; under a different set of circumstances it may completely paralyse the offensive of the proletariat
Prolonged unemployment following a period of revolutionary political assaults and retreats does not at all work in favour of the Communist Party. On the contrary, the longer the crisis lasts, the more it threatens to nourish anarchist moods on one wing and reformist moods on the other." (Hirst Five Years of the Communist International, vol.11 p. 7ft and p. 82)
Economic crisis leads to attacks on workers living standards and jobs. To that extent it increases their bitterness; as they join the dole queue workers who never before questioned the system at all can develop a bitter loathing of everything to do with it. But the crisis also does something else as well: it makes workers with jobs much more wary about entering into struggle. After all, their jobs might be at stake.
This rarely affects them today, as it might have in pre war slumps, through the direct fear that management will sack them and replace them by new personnel from the dole queues. Traditions of union organisation are usually too strong for management even to try that. More insidious mechanisms, however, are at work. These make the individual worker feel that his or her job depends upon the viability of the particular chunk of the system in which they find themselves. Protecting their living standards and working conditions, they are told, will increase the crisis that besets their factory, firm or nation and destroy its ability to provide jobs. The same argument is presented as a more general ideological argument by the media: such is the crisis in society that any sustained struggle over wages, working conditions or hours will push it over the edge not an abys.
Workers can resist this argument. But only if either they have a general political understanding that a viable alternative exists to the present crisis-prone set-up; or if they are so embittered that they are prepared to struggle no matter what the odds are so long as there is some prospect of success.
This enables us to see how workers were willing to struggle during the period of the Heath government in Britain, before the Italian Communist Party gave its blessing to the Andreotti government, until the Moncloa Pact in Spain. The established reformist leaders of the class indicated that there was an alternative to the existing, crisis-prone set-up: the hoisting of themselves into office. Here was a very visible generalised political alternative with which every worker who had a grievance could identify. He or she did not have to have any great illusions in what the reformist leaders could deliver. What mattered is that a direction was indicated that could link the individual grievance with a general sense of movement.
This alternative focus was removed by the policy of at least half-collaboration with the governments by the reformist leaders in Italy and Spain, the defeat of the left in the French elections, the endorsement of the social contract by the 'left' trade union leaders in Britain, the collapse of the radical sections of the Portuguese army on 25 November 1975. This would not have mattered had there been a huge spontaneous upsurge of anger and struggle. Out of that the class would have begun to create at least the embryo of its own alternative. Nor would it have mattered if the revolutionary left had been a massive force, capable of appearing as a credible alternative. But in the situation as it existed, there was no credible alternative to the mass of workers between what the reformists offered and seemingly endless crisis.
The reformists offered virtually nothing in the way of reforms. As the economic crisis deepened their language became closer and closer to that of the ruling class. There was little positive in it for workers to have illusions in. What the reformists were effectively doing was tying workers to the measures proposed by the main sections of the ruling class. Workers went along with this — some sections even to the extent of abandoning the reformists themselves for the openly capitalist parties — because however miserable an option it was, it seemed the only viable option. If there was a revival of reformism among the most advanced sections of workers, it was not through illusions in some great new world offered by the reformist leaders, but because of a lack of faith in any revolutionary alternative.
This particularly affected many of the worker militants who had been prepared to work with, or even join, the revolutionary left in I he earlier period. Then it had often seemed that an alternative lav in (he sheer spontaneity of the workers struggles themselves. Now that was no longer the case. Long drawn out, consistent. Minimised activity was necessary just to maintain elementary forms ol class organisation. And in carrying on this sort of activity, the lower reaches of the reformist bureaucracy were often more helpful than the revolutionary left. Their bureaucratic routines could seem more 'practical' than the revolutionary fervour of the extreme left. They could link the individual militant with a whole network of other activists who could aid him or her. They could provide access to elected office within the ranks of the bureaucracy itself. And they did not demand of the individual militant that he or she argue out a political case day after day that meant clashing with fellow workers, since the bureaucracy's own ideology is very close to the 'common sense' conception drummed into workers by capitalist society.
It is this state of affairs, rather than any great blooming of reformist illusions, that explains the way in which in France the Socialist Party, the CFDT and even the CP have been able to recruit loriner sympathisers of the revolutionary left; the way that in Italy t lie re was the phenomenon of 're-entry' into the CP of ex-rcvolutionaries three or four years ago; the way that in Spain many former revolutionaries who were active under the most dangerous conditions during the Franco period have dropped out, or even moved towards reformism, now that Franco has gone for good; the way that in Britain there has been a steady trickle of activists away horn the revolutionary left towards reformist, 'broad left' activity even to the extent that the younger intellectual cadre of the CP is made up largely of individuals who claimed once upon a time to be revolutionaries.
The roots of the crisis: (3) The 'crisis of militancy'
The revitalisation of the reformist organisations and the changed mood of the class do not by themselves explain why the revolutionary left has been thrown into crisis. Two additional factors are important — one subjective, to do with the motivations ol the cadre of the revolutionary organisations, the other political. There is no doubt that an important factor in the crises of the i evolutionary left in France, Italy and Spain has been what has been tailed 'the crisis of militancy'. By the mid 1970s much of the cadre of the revolutionary organisations had been involved in non-stop activity for seven, eight or even ten years. They had come to politics on the barricades in 1968-9 and had hardly stopped moving since. I >av after day, week after week, year after year they sold papers, produced bulletins, stood outside factories, argued over minor programmatic points. This did not seem to matter when the movement was going from strength to strength. But when the forward momentum was checked, much of the activity seemed to lose its point.
The 'tiredness' became most marked in Italy after the elections of June 1976, in Spain after the consolidation of the post-Franco regime, in Britain after the downturn in the class struggle in 1975 (the number of strikes fell to the lowest level for 10 years in 1976) and again with the relative downturn in the struggle after the defeat of the firemen's strike at the beginning of 1978.
The mood created, in some cases, a sort of 'rebellion' among the members against the demands of the organisations. In France there was even an example in 1977 of one branch of the LCR going on strike (i.e. refusing to pay subs, attend meetings, sell the paper or read the internal bulletin) until the leadership allowed shorter hours of activity! At the traumatic Lotta Continua conference of 1976, the demand developed, according to an official summary, that 'one's own existence and condition in society should be recognised as the basis for one's own participation in the construction of the revolutionary party' (quoted Italy 1977-8 p.83): the feeling existed that 'activity' for many militants consisted of selling papers and handing out leaflets from the outside to struggles that did not concern their own lives.
Such moods have undoubtedly been most prevalent among those from the student milieu from 1968. They have either been outside the struggles they had to worry about, or they were 'industrialised', bearing a voluntary burden in the factory. Once the struggle takes a down turn, it is all too tempting to drop that burden, in a way which is not so open to those born into the working class.
But the mood has affected 'real' workers as well. In a few cases it has led them to take escape routes from the factory into courses in higher education, into teaching trade union courses, etc; more often it led them to the easy temptation of adopting semi-reformist attitudes that open up the way to near full time trade union activity.
The personal tiredness of many of the 1968 generation of revolutionary cadre is a general feature throughout Europe. No organisation has been immune to it. However, that does not mean that a crisis of the revolutionary left has been inevitable. The reason crises have developed in certain organisations has been because their politics did not enable them to cope with the tired attitudes of some of their members. A leader of Lotta Continua wrote at the end of 1976, 'revolutionaries have taken the results of the 20 June general election as a defeat — even a personal defeat — although it was not seen like this by the great mass of people' (quoted in Italy 1977-8 p.82). But that was at least in part because of what the politics of the Italian revolutionary left was before 1976.
Roots of the crisis: (4) The politics of the revolutionary left
The political traditions of the European revolutionary left flow from two different main sources.
The first originates in Maoism and/or Guevarism. This was the tradition of AO and Lotta Continua in Italy, of the MC, the ORT, th PTE and Bandiera Roja in Spain; of the UDP and (in its Guevarist form) of the PRP-BR in Portugal.
Usually the Maoism is diluted. The 'orthodox' or 'hard' 'ML' Maoist groups have not generally worn very well (although large organisations still clinging to the orthodoxy survive in Spain, Germany and Scandinavia). But a whole host of vaguely Maoist notions continue to befuddle the political thinking of the major chunk of the European left.
Typically, the 1974 AO Congress spoke of the need to learn from the experience of the Chinese Communist Party; the Lotta Continua Congress of December 1974 'officially adopted a Leninist type of statute (actually modelled on the statute of the Chinese Communist Party)' (Italy 1977-8 p. 110); and the Spanish Movimiento Commumsta still speaks of the need for a party which 'assimilates, applies and develops Marxism-Leninism, enriched by the contributions of Mao Tse Tung and by the experiences of the international revolutionary movement.' (Hacia La Unidad, Documentos para la Preparacion del Congresso extraordinario de unification, MC-OIC, December 1978).
Exactly what 'learning from Mao Tse Tung' has meant has varied considerably from organisation to organisation. But the following elements are common to the political practice of most of th 'soft Maoist' (and 'soft Guevarist') organisations.
1.A strong trend of 'third worldism', which sees the role of'oppressed people' or even 'oppressed countries' in fighting imperialism as being as important for achieving socialism as the role of the working class. Hence continual talk of the need for 'alliances with (undefined) progressive countries'. This trend cut very much
with the grain in the late sixties and early seventies when it was a case of the Vietnamese fighting US imperialism or the Angolans fighting Portuguese, South African and US imperialism. It does not have much to say today when the Vietnamese are fighting the Chinese,the Ethiopians the Eritreans etc.
2. Following very much from (1) a strong strand of 'populism' —i.e. seeing the revolutionary class as being not necessarily theworkers, but a vague entity called 'the people'. Hence, one of the leaders of AO declared in 1975, "there are parts of the world where the historical role given to the working class by Marx are functions today developed in other social groups. . .' (Massimo Gorla translated in Revolutionary Politics Today: A debate between AO and IS", in IS 84 p. 16) "What is meant by proletarian elements is workers and peasants. . .' (ibid, p. 13).
Once other classes than the workers are accepted as playing a key role in the "third world' it is not difficult for some revolutionary organisations to apply the same notion to the advanced countries. Hence in announcing that it was going to merge into the Movimiento Communista, the Spanish OIC declared that "the proletariat and the people are objectively revolutionary classes' ("Manifesto Ideologico de la OIC", in Boletin Interna, 6 Deciembre, 1978). One leader of Lotta Continua has gone as far a sto speak of 'the proletariat' as "all those sectors who, having been invested by the strength and the contents of the workers struggles over the past few years, have now found, or are beginning to find, the path towards their own autonomous growth as a movement and a mass organisation: the unemployed, the state and local
government employees, the young people, the soldiers, the social struggle etc. . .' (Guido Viale, quoted at length in Italy 1977-8 p.84).
3 A certain desire to return to what the CPs were like 'before revisionism took them over' — whether this is seen as having occurred in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s. There is a tendency to identify the 'Marxist-Leninist' organisational form with the form of the Stalinised parties of those years. Partly this is because of the impact of Maoism. Partly also it is a certain nostalgia — in Italy for the armed struggle of the CP-led resistance, in Spain for the time when the CP was certainly not soft.
In practice, the result has been organisational forms which allow virtually no participation of the members of the organisation in (he discussions about its politics and direction. Congresses are dominated by the platform (I was amazed as a visitor to the 1974 AO Congress to find the whole of the first session devoted to a three hour speech by the general secretary), with no debate developing between different positions or resolutions. Internal bulletins (where they exist) merely print the documents of the leadership, not disagreements. There is a tendency for the general secretary of the p.iiiv lo be seen as the 'leader'. It has to be stressed that this style of onducting organisations in the name of 'Marxism-Leninism' developed even where there was a nominal commitment to a i nii|iie of Stalinism, as for instance in AO.
•
4 A final characteristic of most of these organisations, at least in ilieu early phase of development was a certain 'triumphalist' ultralefItism. They were very much a product of the mood created by the cultural revolution in China, the victories of the Vietnamese over the Americans, the spread of urban guerrilla-ism in Latin America and the May events in France. It is a mood which proclaimed 'victory is certain', and which downplayed both the importance of defeats and the power of reformism.
In the case of Lotta Continua, for example, its line until well into the early 1970s was that the trade unions were the principle instruments by which the CP could regain its control over the workers' movement. At the beginning, it also included factory councils in this view. It refused to intervene in either, and raised the slogan 'we are all delegates' at a time when the real battle was over the attempt of the trade union bureaucracy to integrate the councils into its structure.
AO's attitude was more complex. It recognised that the unions had great power, but instead of waging a struggle inside the existing trade unions, it called for the creation of revolutionary unions. When it came to form Base Groups in the factories (CUBs) it was never clear whether these were simply groups of revolutionaries, or groupings attempting to involve other workers who were in the unions in a struggle against the line of the CP and the union bureaucracy.
The other main current within the international revolutionary left was that deriving from Trotskyism: the French and Spanish LCRs, and the two French organisations not connected to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, Lutte Ouvriere and the Organisation Communiste International (usually referred to as the Lambertists).
On the face of it, the Fourth International and the Lambertisls stood on ground completely different to that of the soft, third worldist, populist-Maoists. Their traditions claimed to go back, not to the great helmsman, but to the first four congresses of the Communist International and Trotsky's critique of Stalinism.
Yet, in practice, the differences were not always that great. Trotsky's would-be heirs were afflicted by much of the same political and theoretical confusions as the soft Maoists. 'Orthodox Trotskyism' had proved unable in the 1940s and 1950s to come to terms either with the long drawn-out boom of the western economies or, more importantly, with the victories of Stalinist type parties in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Despite the fact that the working class had not been responsible for any of these victories, they accepted analyses thill described them as 'workers states' (for a fuller analysis of these points see Duncan Hallas, "Building the Leadership". IS 40 (old series)).
It was not a far step from this to seeing themselves in much the same way as the soft Maoists did, as part of world wide movement towards socialism embracing all sorts of forces that had nothing to do with the working class. If AO and MC praised 'comrade Mao', the Fourth International could write lovingly of 'comrade Fidel', lor the Fourth International, as for the Maoists, the Vietnamese Communist Party became a 'socialist', a 'workers party'. Indeed, in ihe early 1960s a section of the Fourth International leadership even developed a theory that had Algeria as a 'workers and peasants government'.
With a 'theory' that separated off the achievement of socialism from the self emancipation of the working class, it was not surprising that the Trotskyists' had a habit of adopting practices that downgraded the importance of the class as well. Prior to 1968 this meant an adaptation towards left reformism, whether, as in Italy through entry into the Communist Party so deep as to become invisible, or in this country through publishing a paper jointly with a number of left Labour MPs.
However, the blossoming of the student movement internationally pulled at least a section of the International away from this particular strategy. Now they joined in the student movement enthusiastically, adopting its slogans, carrying with it portraits of Che Guevara, rejoicing in the general rhetoric — and loretting to a very large extent about the working class. In this country, for example, they adopted the idea that revolutionaries should create 'red bases' in the universities.
What was common to both the soft Maoists and the would be 'orthodox Trotskyists' was substitutionism: the idea that some other force could substitute itself for the working class in the creation of socialism. While the movement was on the up in Italy or France or Spain (or Britain, for that matter) this was not necessarily that apparent. Workers were in motion, and you had to be a fool not to ielate to them (although, as always, there were a fair number of tools). But when, from the mid 1970s onwards the movement was checked, the substitutionism could easily lead revolutionaries to look to false gods — to the trade union bureaucracy, to liberal democracy, to armed lunacy, or even to changes in their own life styles.
Moving to the right: (1) the soft maoists
There was, as we have seen, a change in the mood of workers as the economic crisis grew deeper and reformist leaders started giving open or covert support for government measures. The shift in the centre of political discussion to the right affected the wide layers of workers who were not particularly active in the workers' movement and who had only partially ever broken from the 'ruling ideas' inculcated in them at school and pumped out by the media.
Their 'common sense' attitudes shifted to the right. This in turn exercised a powerful pressure on those militants who previously had been prepared to go along with much of what the revolutionary left said. The mood in the factories was such that faced with a wage claim it became 'more practical' to talk in terms of productivity payments than in terms of across-the-board rises; when faced with threatened redundancies it was 'more practical' to go into 'viability discussions' with management rather than to raise the demand 'occupy, nationalise'; faced with a national unemployment level of a million plus and a national inflation rate anywhere between 10 and 25 per cent, it seemed more 'reasonable' to argue about trading off wage controls for 'alternative economic policies' or 'social investment plans' rather than to call for the overthrow of the system.
In the earlier period, many militants with vaguely reformist ideas has been prepared to go much further than the reformist leaders in the struggle for economic demands that the leaders claimed, half heartedly, to support. Now the same militants themselves often voiced the reformist arguments in the factories.
The members of the revolutionary organisations suddenly found themselves isolated. For reasons they could not quite fathom they were no longer going from success to success. Their papers sales were stagnating or falling; there was little response to their calls for solidarity with particular groups of workers who were fighting; some worker members were dropping out of their organisations.
The easiest response for the revolutioary organisations in this situation was to swim with the rightward moving tide themselves. In case after case, the organisations — especially the organisations that had been previously marred by a 'leftist' dismissal of the structures of the reformist Labour movement — shifted their own policies to the right. In some cases the shift was so radical as to mean the abandonment of a revolutioary perpective for a reformist or semi-reformist one.
The move to the right was already apparent in Italy in 1974. The CP had gained control over the factory councils in the years previously, and the student movement had gone into a (temporary) decline: the revolutionary left was losing its basis of support. Mass movements had continued through these years over a variety of issues: inflation, unemployment, housing, democratisation of the police, prisons and the army. Frequently they mobilised tens of thousands of people, prepared to engage in the most militant tactics, initiated by the revolutionary left. Yet there was no
significant accretion of strength to the revolutionaries: the workers they mobilised continued to support the Communist Party politically. (This was shown very clearly in the 1975 and 1976 elections when the revolutionary left got only 1-5 per cent of the vote, despite the huge demonstrations they had recently been capable of leading).
The reaction to the right was most marked in the case of the II Manifesto group. They were led by former leading Communist intellectuals who in 1969 had split from the CP to the left under the impact of the mass movement and of events internationally, and had then merged with the remnants of a previous left split from the Socialist Party (which had particular strength in certain sections of the lower and middle ranks and the trade union bureaucracy) to form a quite sizeable organisation, II Manifesto-PdUP. (it claimed greater numbers than Lotta Continua and AO, but its membership was much less active). But as the CP reasserted its control over the mass movement, the principal leaders of II Manifesto, Lucio Magri and Rosana Rosanda began to rethink the strategy of building a separate party. Lucio Magri formulated a perspective in which the role of the left intellectuals of II Manifesto was to be a 'motor to 25 million Communist legs' — i.e. to exert pressure on the CP pulling it to the left. The labour movement was to be 'recomposed from within, without tearing the fabric'. The logic of Magri's position would be for II Manifesto to rejoin the CP — although other leaders have resisted such a move so far, preferring to pressurise the CP from the outside.
Within two years the effect of the new II Manifesto orientation was to split the PdUP, with the bulk of the trade unionists breaking .iway to the left.
The leaders of Avanguardia Operaia had seen the organisation ilay were building as much more solidly rooted in revolutionary politics and in Leninism than II Manifesto and the PdUP: they had 11 .iihtionally poured scorn on II Manifesto-PdUP as 'centrist'. Yet now they too were pulled to the right. At their 1974 congress they claimed that revolutionaries had to stop being 'minoritorial', and hid lo try to fill the gap created as the CP moved to the right. This meant recognising that the reformist line of the CP had two • contradictions: it was incapable of winning the reforms it wanted • and it was incapable of involving the masses in the struggle for those reforms.. Therefore,.what was necessary was 'the revolutionary fight for reforms;, where the left could gather round it the best miliants involved in the struggle. The revolutionaries had to take ground the CP had prepared, but was now abandoning. And they had to do this both at the level of economic struggles and the struggle for 'democratic demands'.
As abstractly formulated, there seemed nothing wrong with the argument. Revolutionary Marxists have always recognised that certain reforms could only be achieved by the method of revolutionary struggle. But in practice, it soon became clear that some at least of the leaders of AO conceived of the 'revolutionary struggle for reforms' as hardly different from the reformist struggle for reforms.
For the 1976 general elections they produced a joint programme with II Manifesto-PdUP. The central point made in the programme was not the need for workers to maintain their class independence in the struggle for socialism, but to bring to power a 'left' government made up, apparently, of the two reformist parties and the revolutionaries. It actually went so far as to argue that such a government would be "an active instrument in the general process of the transformation of society'. 'Constant mass pressure on the government' could 'make it refuse any role ... in stabilising the capitalist system'. Typically, the pressure on the government would be for things such as 'import controls', 'renegotiation of the common market agricultural system', 'direction of investment' and 'a new international division of labour'.
It can be argued that with such a programme, there was very little reason for workers to vote for the AO-I1 Manifesto-PdUP list rather than the reformists themselves. What was certainly the case was that by fighting on such a programme, the revolutionaries did not even gain, in compensation for their small number of votes, the chance of making large scale, consistent, revolutionary propaganda.
Unfortunately, even the small vote in the elections did not make the leaders of AO think again. The secretary of the party, Campi, rapidly drew conclusions that were no different from those of II Manifesto. The revolutionary left was suffering because it was not sufficiently committed to the 'revolutionary' fight for reforms. It had not broken with a 'sterile intransigence' which cut it off from the wider movement.
Eventually he was resisted by a majority of the AO leaders and left to join with II manifesto. But not before the organisation had been paralysed for months, with a very large number of its members dropping out (according to one estimate, the number of its supporters in Milan fell from about 3000 to about 1000). And the remaining leaders of AO could hardly be said to have been clear themselves. They continued to attempt to put forward a half-reformist programme for dealing with the Italian crisis. They merged with the left, PdUP half of the old PdUP-Il Manifesto. But it was 18 months before the new organisation, Democrazia Proletaria, even got an inaugural congress together.
The third Italian organisation, Lotta Continua, has been more successful than the others in resisting the pull to the right — perhaps because the ultra-left street fighting tradition is most deeply engrained in its cadre. Yet even it veered to the right in 1975-6. In the 1975 elections it refused either to run its own candidates or to tell people to vote for the AO-PdUP-Il Manifesto list. Instead, it told people to vote CP, in order to expose them, under the slogan 'CP to the government'. It veered again before the 1976 elections, putting its own candidates up on the same list as AO-PdUP-Il Manifesto, but with a programme of its own.
It shared the general euphoria in the run-up to the elections — and the same deep, hung over pessimism on the morrow. Indeed, the election results led its general secretary Sofri to produce a political perspective which saw the revolutionary wave on the retreat everywhere, leaving revolutionaries with the only option of very slow, unrewarding work. For Italy, that meant a campaign centred around the single demand of the 35 hour week.
The turn by the Lotta Continua leadership seems to have been greeted with incredulity by much of the membership. 'For the first time people were left without any sense of direction', remarked one female comrade summing up much of the mood of the members at an assembly of the organisation in July 1976 (quoted in Praxis, August-Sept 76 p.8). The resulting disorientation was one of the factors that tore the organisation apart at its Congress three months later.
The veering to the right has not been something confined to Italy. The Swedish organisation Forbundet Kommunist has provided an account of its own lurch in that direction (although it characterises it as a discovery of 'leninism'):
'The strategic debate in Fbrbundct kommunist may be divided into three periods:
"The first period is characterised by a dogmatic Leninist outlook, lacking a strategic perspective. . . The slogans then were to transform the spontaneous struggle to a revolutionary struggle to school a revolutionary cadre. . .
'The second period is strategically characterised by the concentration of independent struggle for a new workers movement outside the traditional workers' organisations. The idea was that outside the traditional trade unions, new democratically controlled tools for working class struggle would develop. Round this a new workers movement would be formed, which would school and strengthen its position through struggle for advanced economic demands. . .
'The third strategic period' involves 'a re-establishment of Leninism, but now in a more developed form, and of the political struggle which was lost during the spontaneous frenzy of the second period. . . The third period politics points out the importance of structural reforms and alliances with reformists as elements in the revolutionary process in a land like Sweden. . . The necessary resistance against the attacks of the bourgeoisie much be linked with an offensive struggle concerned with the direction and the type of production'. (The) 'strategic' (way forward, is to start with putting demands for) 'alternative production' (demands which it is only) 'possible to carry out on an extremely small scale'. (This will prepare the ground for building a) 'new political block of revolutionaries, reformists and environmentalist-political forces' (based on) 'a new development plan for Sweden' (which) 'through anti-capitalist intervention tries to break the dependence on the capitalist world market'. (To build in this direction means an end to raising) 'unrealistic demands'.
In a phrase which could come straight out of some Eurocommunist tract, it is stressed,'we are breaking away from the former high bidding politics of the left and even starting to fight them.' (All quotes from FK. International Bulletin, No.2, 1978)
The conclusions FK draw from this analysis are discussed elsewhere in this journal (see the article by Phil Spencer).
FK's position, ending up proposing measures little different from that of Tony Benn and left social democracy in Britain is important because it carries to its logical conclusion a trend which is apparent in other countries. The FK documents arguing this line themselves refer to an 'international discussion' moving in the same direction from 'the Italian organisation Avanguardia Operaia' and from 'Bent Moos of the Danish organisation Kommunistisk Forbund'. (ibid).
Moving to the right: (2) the would-be Trotskyists
The move of the Swedish FK towards reformism follows from an attempt to bridge the gap that the economic crisis has opened up between the general analysis revolutionaries are able to make of capitalism and our inability to offer an immediate alternative to workers, apart from a list of defensive slogans. The failure is not, however, something that we can overcome of our own volition — since the revolutionary alternative involves precisely the self-activity of workers, not revolutionaries substituting themselves for workers. It is the objective downturn in the level of struggle that robs our slogans of their 'credibility', not the way we voice them (although this can, of course, usually be improved).
In the absence of working class struggle, the attempt by revolutionaries to present 'practical' alternatives means revolutionaries behaving like reformists. In the case of FK, the specific form this has taken has been to give the impression that a government operating within capitalism will mean a mitigation of the effects of the crisis on workers and lead, more or less automatically, to the weakening of the system. Since this government is to be made up of reformists, this has meant the systematic creation of illusions in reformism.
A similar tendency to create these illusions has been apparent in much of the Trotskyist' trend within the European revolutionary movement. As we have seen, in the late sixties and early 1970s, a good part of allegedly 'Trotskyist' politics consisted in undigested chunks of third worldism, student vanguardism and 'movementism'. In practice, this meant a certain proneness to the same street fighting ultra-leftism as the soft Maoists (indeed, some of the Trotskyists' were much worse than the saner soft-Maoist groups).
But there was always another angle to 'Orthodox Trotskyism'. This resisted the ultra-leftism and on occasion the 'studentism', basing itself on the 'Trotskyist tradition".
This was apparent with one wing of the Fourth International and with the Lambertists at the time of the Portuguese revolution in 1974-5. The Lambertists identified openly with the reformist opponents of a radicalisation of the revolution. They lauded the leader of Portuguese social democracy, Mario Soares, as the man who was stopping Portugal moving to East European type totalitarianism (that was exactly the tenor of a series of letters to the British Left Labour paper Tribune by one of the handful of British Lambertists, Mark Jenkins).
They justified this by claiming that the mobilisations of the farmers in the North of Portugal and of the middle class nationally against the leftward shift of the revolution were the main features of a movement of the masses, focussed through the Socialist Party, around the question of democratic freedoms.
The offensive against the left which led to the burning of the offices of revolutionary organisations, of the Communist Party and of trade unions was organised by underground committees with a membership stretching from the right wing of the Socialist Party through to the collaborators of Spinola (see the various revelations that appeared in the bourgeois weekly Expresso in 1976). To the Lambertists it 'had as its main component not organised reaction, but on the contrary was an expression of the extremely deep frustration felt against the Stalinists for their outright support of the bourgois order, whose main guardian is the Armed Forces Movement'. (Marxist Bulletin, Winter 1976 p.8).
This was justified 'theoretically' by making a distinction between the Socialist Party, which was seen as 'a workers party which remains within the framework of bourgeois society and its slate', and the 'fundamentally different' Communist Party, 'which has no precise policy or programme but that of defending on every occasion the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy'. Because of this 11 is not the Socialist Party which in Portugal is waging a bitter si niggle against the masses for the benefit of the restoration of the bourgeoisie. . .' (The French Lambertists paper. La Verite, Sept 75, quoted in ibid).
The position of the American SWP was, in practice, little different. They, and their minute satellite organisation on the ground in Portugal, regarded the great danger at that time as being the alleged threat of 'Bonapartism' from the weak group of left wing officers (the MFA) who managed to dominate Portuguese politics for a little over a year by manoeuvring between the classes and making concession after concession to the workers. So they set their faces against the radical measures being taken by the working class in Lisbon and the South of the country in the name of 'defending democratic rights' against the 'Bonapartists' and the 'Stalinists'! Typically, they raised the slogan 'Up with the constituent assembly' (although it contained a majority of counter-revolutionaries and right wing social democrats) and opposed the takeover by its printers of the paper Republica as 'an attack on freedom of the press'. It is important to stress, that the support for the constituent assembly and the owners of Republica was based on principle, and was not merely advice to workers not to do things that were correct too quickly.
The perverse counter-revolutionary politics of the Lambertists and the nearly as dubious arguments of the American SWP would not perhaps matter, were it not that there are multiple signs that a significant chunk of the leadership of the French LCR (and possibly the Spanish LCR) has been drawn towards their political positions in the last couple of years.
The French LCR displayed signs of a significant shift to the right by the mid-1970s. The narrowness of the victory of Giscard over the Socialist Party candidate, Mitterrand, marked a crucial turning point in French politics. From now on, the formation of a government by the left union (the SP, CP left radical front) became a distinct possibility. Among French workers this was a much more appealing prospect than the formation of a Labour government might be in Britain — the left had not run the government in France for nearly 30 years.
The revolutionary left had no choice but to take account of this, and to say in effect to workers, 'OK, you believe a Left Union government will solve your problems. We don't. But put the Left Union in government and we will see who is correct'.
But the LCR went much further than this. It developed a fantastically mechanical view of what a 'Left Union' government would mean, transcribing into the 1970s what happened in 1936 when the Popular Front government was elected. Within days a huge wave of factory occupations had followed. Now that scenario was just possible in the 1970s — but more likely was a British type scenario, with a Left Union government exploiting the illusions of workers to cool down the struggle and to get away with measures a right wing government never could.
In any case, faced with a reformist government, revolutionaries have the difficult task of carrying though a double strategy: on the one hand to maintain their own complete independence from the government and urging the class to do the same; on the other to fight for demands of a limited character (some of which may even have figured in the left's election programme) alongside workers who have illusions in that government.
This double-edged approach is always difficult to carry out. There will always be pressure on revolutionaries in the workplace to give in to the pressure of the reformist influenced workers around them and to drop their specific criticisms of reformism in the run up to a major election. The task of the party leadership is to aid the members in resisting such pressures.
It cannot be said that the LCR provided such aid. Instead it gave the impression that the mere election of a Left Unity government would open up the ground for revolutionary advance and that revolutionaries should tone down their criticisms of the Left Union.
At one point Alain Krivine, one of the LCR leaders, went so far as to argue that the reformist leaders were frightened to form a government because it would threaten the system. This was after the left had done quite well in the 1976 local elections. He wrote, 'In such a situation, the workers are right to say to the CP and the SP we've given you a majority, use it. It's possible to throw out this minority regime by basing yourselves on our struggles. CP, SP, take your responsibilities'. (Rouge 17.3.76)
A few months later, he went on to suggest that if a Left Union government were elected, revolutionaries would have to keep quiet about their criticisms of it when it came to mass work. 'For a longer or shorter period . . . there would be a period of enthusiasm, of real mobilisation of the working class with enormous illusions. . . The essential axis of revolutionaries will not immediately be the battle to overthrow the left government. That wouldn't be understood by workers who hadn't gone through the reformist experience. . .' (quoted in Revolution, 2.7.76)
Perhaps more dangerous than the possibility of the members dropping their criticisms of the Left Union after a successful election for the left, was the resultant stress on elections and electoral manoeuvring as the way forward for the class. The impression was created that there was nothing militants could do until the Left Union was in power.
But then, shortly before the elections were due to take place in the Spring of 1978, the Left Union fell apart. For its own opportunist reasons (because the Union was strengthening the SP until it had more support than the CP) the leadership of the French CP suddenly took a 'left' turn and demanded a harder programme from its Socialist allies. The SP rejected this, and the two parties entered the first round of the election at odds with each other. A central part of the argument of the SP leadership was that the CP had exposed themselves as 'splitters'.
The revolutionary left could not, of course, keep quiet at such a juncture. There was a very simple argument for them to put across: both the CP and the SP leaders had been telling workers for years not to 'rock the boat' before elections by undue militancy — and now the people who had said this were 'rocking the boat' themselves. This proved how wrong the 'unity at any price' argument had been all along.
This was not, however, the argument of the LCR. Instead, they proclaimed the day after the election defeat in words that must have seemed like SP propaganda to many CP members, 'The price of disunity'. In the period since, their main slogan has been for the 'Front Unique Ouvriere' — not meaning by this a united front of revolutionaries and reformists around particular, partial demands that the reformist leaders claim to support, but abstract unity at the top between the CP and the SP. Again, since it was the CP who disrupted the previous unity, the slogan excuses the SP leadership who want just enough 'unity' to hoist themselves into electoral office.
In practice, the LCR slogan tends to support the reformist SP leadership in its quarrels with the reformist CP leadership, even though the organised core of the French working class still see the CP and its union, the CGT, as 'more militant' than the SP. The line of support for the SP has long been the position of the Lambertists. It is therefore not surprising that within the LCR a sizeable chunk of the leadership have come to the logical conclusion that they should move towards unity of their organisation and that of the OCI.
The turn to the right within the European section of the USFI has not been confined to France. In Britain, the IMG which had predicted dual power in 1974 was advising its members to enter the Labour party in 1975. Since then, the emphasis has shifted to open work through electioneering and to work within the Broad Lefts in trade unions. The rightward drift is shown by the slogan raised by a spokesman of the IMG in a special issue of their paper concerned with the reaction of the left to the rejection of the government's five per cent wage norm by key groups of workers: 'Recall the Labour Party conference', wrote Brian Grogan.
One indication of the overall rightward shift in the European sections of the USFI is the way in which their long row with the American section, the American SWP, has been liquidated. Where there used to be rival USFI sections in particular countries they have been merged — and on terms which give the 'pro-American SWP' elements more than a fair share of influence. A second indication is the way that in theory some of the old positions defended by the American SWP have been implicitly accepted by the other leaders of the international'. During the revolutionary period in Portugal, in 1974-5, the 'European USFI' group in Portugal, the LCI, raised demands not all that different from the rest of the extreme left. It supported the Republica workers, and it initiated the negotiations that led to the setting up of the joint revolutionary-centrist-CP front, the FUR. (see issues of Imprecor for the Summer of 1975).
Today, however, the leaders of the USFI condemn such decisions. They see the action of the Republica workers in challenging the right socialist chief shareholder of that paper, Paul Rego, as the action that led to the defeat of the revolution. 'The Portuguese revolution', Ernest Mandel has written, 'was blown off course' over the question of 'freedom of the press' (NLR 100 p. 110). Such has ben the shift to the right in the revolutionary, "European", sections of the Fourth International that they are now parrotting phrases that only used to come from the decidedly non-revolutionary American section — which goes part of the way to explain why some of them hankerfor unity with the Lambertists, for whom the American SWP has long felt a certain affection.
As with the soft Maoists, a formerly ultra left stance has wilted when faced with the stark reality of a temporary downturn in the level of struggle. Again, as with soft Maoists, the characteristic expression of this has been a softening of the attitude towards reformist organisations, even to the extent of pretending that in the guise of 'left governments' (for the soft Maoists) or 'workers governments' (for the alleged Trotskyists) they can 'open up the way' for revolutionary transformation. Finally, in the case of some of the soft Maoists and virtually all of the 'Trotskyists' 'intermediate' or 'transitional demands' are raised in the abstract, without seeing how they relate in the here and now to the only agency that can carry through a revolutionary transformation of society — the working class. Whether in the name of 'Marxist-Leninist tactics' or in the name of 'the transitional programme of the Fourth International' the central element in Marxism is forgotten for the sake of short term manoeuvring.
Moving to the margins
A downturn in the level of generalised class struggle does not mean that all struggles die away. A whole range of particular struggles can flare up and become very bitter indeed while the big battalions of the working class remain quiescent. So in Britain, in the doldrum years of 1975-6 we saw a very militant reaction against racist attacks within the Asian community, a very important strike for equal pay by the Trico workers, we saw sections of workers who had never taken action before get involved in one day strikes and demonstrations against the public sector cuts, and we saw the biggest wave of student occupations for several years. More recently during the lull after the defeat of the firemen's strike in 1978, we saw the Anti Nazi League draw into demonstrations the biggest numbers seen in Britain since the demonstrations against the Conservatives' Industrial Relations Bill in the early seventies.
In Italy there was a similar phenomenon in 1977 — the year after the Communist Party first threw its weight behind the Andreotti Christian Democrat government and successfully de-escalated the industrial struggle. A huge wave of student struggles blew up in Bologna and Rome, and drew into bigger conflicts with the police and the CP tens of thousands of students and unemployed ex-students throughout the country.
In Spain during the period in which the pact of Moncloa was holding down the industrial struggle, there seems to have been a flourishing of all sorts of movements for national and regional autonomy, outside the traditional centres of national opposition to the Spanish state in Euskadi (the Basque country) and Catalonia. It was during this period, for instance, that a vicious police attack on an autonomist demonstration in Malaga led to a general strike throughout Southern Spain.
Revolutionaries cannot ignore such movements. Their conflicts with the existing state power can bring whole new layers of people to see the need for socialist revolution. If revolutionaries know how to intervene in them, they can refurbish their ranks and maintain the feeling of struggle within their own organisations at a time when the low level of the class struggle encourages some comrades to drop out and others to adopt timid, conservative attitudes.
However, there is always a danger when an organisation works in relationship to such protest movements (just as there is always a danger of drowning when you go swimming — although that is not of course a reason for not taking part in the activity). It is that the members come to think that revolutionary political activity consists in demonstrations against the police, or simply taking part in these movements, and not in fighting to link them with the much more difficult struggle for workers' power.
A great deal of tactical flexibility is needed, since such movements tend to flare up very quickly, can become very intense and very militant for a brief moment — and then die away just as quickly. A revolutionary organisation has to be prepared to work in them unreservedly, to argue for a policy of militant confrontation with the powers that be against those who see the movement as achieving its goals in reformist terms — but at the same time to recognise that the movement may well be fairly short lived and that only those of its members who come to see the need for class politics will survive.
If a revolutionary organisation cannot combine such tactical flexibility with a principled defence of class politics, then far from these movements contributing to the building of the revolutionary forces in society, they can dissipate and weaken the revolutionaries themselves.
The Italian case shows very clearly what such disorientation means. All three major revolutionary organisations were moving to the right in 1976. This led them to distance themselves from their own members who got caught up in the 'movements' that began to build up outside the mainstream of the working class. They lost many of their best and most active rank and file members; and within the 'movements' a whole ideology developed of 'autonomism' — they had to keep out politics, because politics meant the right wing behaviour of the leaders of the revolutionary organisations.
The destructive dialectic at work showed itself first in Lotta Continua. LC was the most left wing of the revolutionary organisations in 1976, and the one that turned its back least on the 'movements'. But it had also tried to cast itself in a Marxist-Leninist (i.e. Maoist) mould. In December 1975 this still meant the party as the repository of Mao's thought laying down the line to the masses. The women's movement organised a large demonstration against the reactionary abortion laws. It was on a women only basis - and so Lotta Continua's all male servizio d'ordine (stewards) broke into the demonstration on the grounds that abortion was an issue for both men and women. The result was a departure of large numbers of women from Lotta Continua in disgust.
The women who remained inside the organisation began to feel that there was some connection between the leadership style of the organisation and what had happened. But few saw the connection in the whole tradition of Stalinist politics which Maoism had passed on to the revolutionary left. Most saw at fault the whole notion of a revolutionary organisation trying to work out a consistent line that linked particular movements into the overall struggle for workers' power. At the 1977 Lotta Continua Congress, the organisation's leadership came to adopt very much the same standpoint. They abandoned the attempt to try to create an organisation that would argue its politics within the different movements, and instead began to define politics as the sum-total of all the different movements. In the months that followed Lotta Continua dissolved itself as an organisation in an effort to become the movement.
This self-dissolution did not — and could not — solve the problems facing the revolutionary left. The 'movements' that flourished so much in 1977 died down as rapidly as they had grown — and in the process underwent intense political polarisation.
The 'autonomy' of the student/unemployed ex-student movement did not stop the development within it of bitter divisions between the supporters of immediate all-out armed action against the state, and those who had a saner view. (For an account of this period which is excellent despite — or perhaps because of — the authors' sympathy with the 'autonomy' argument, see Italy 1977-8). The 'autonomy' of the women's movement did not alter the fact that despite its power in 1976-7, it was a coming together of women from different social classes, motivated above all by the fight for the right to abortion, which could not hang together for long once that battle was sold out by the CP and an extremely reactionary 'liberal' abortion law was on the statute book.
Lotta Continua's burying of itself in the 'movements' in 1977 had the same effect as its disdain for a movement it could not dominate with its Mao derived theories in 1975. There was no consistent force at work within the movements, drawing the best elements in them to a revolutionary socialist world view and to the organisational consequences of that (i.e. the need to build a party rooted in the workplaces). Instead, Lotta Continua's own theories came to see virtually any 'autonomous' protest movement as 'the proletariat', however indifferent to it the vast mass of CP-voting Italian workers actually were. 'If the historians of the future have time to spare, they will be able to collect hundreds of articles from Lotta Continua in which any students disposed to go into the street with slogans are referred to as proletarians' (P. Petti in Praxis, Feb 1979, p.25).
Yet, at least Lotta Continua did relate to the movements of 1977. The other organisations of the revolutionary left hardly seem to have done so at all. Their own concern in 1976 to distance themselves from 'extremism' hardly left them any ability to offer leadership to the new groups thrown into struggle a year later. They remained paralysed, torn by internal crises, while their rank and file militants either dropped out of action, or tamely lagged behind demonstrations of the 'autonomisti'.
Yet it cannot be said that the movement of 1977 had no effect on Democrazia Proletaria (the new organisation built by the merger of the majority of AO and the PdUP). The confidence of its leadership was shaken, so much so that when the first conference of the new organisation took place in 1978 it refused to set out any precise organisational structures.
This was deliberate. It was, claimed a congress document, meant to discourage 'any individualistic posing, any leaderism'. (quoted in Praxis, May 1978 p.5). There were no formal votes on strategy or tactics; this was 'a moment in the process of re-aggregation' of the revolutionary left rather than a formal conference. But such formulations could not hide the fact that a general discussion involving 2000 comrades could not begin to resolve the problems facing the Italian revolutionary left. 'When questioned about this, the organisers admitted that the left in general and DP in particular were in no condition to take and abide by decisions passed by a majority and that until some consensus was achieved within the organisation over the very basis of their politics, a formal conference would not have been very useful' (Tim Potter, in SWP International Discussion Bulletin no.7/8 p.28). The congress did repudiate the old 'left government' line. However, other analyses of the congress showed that this confusion had been replaced by other confusions, imported into DP from the 'autonomous' movements it had failed to relate to in 1977. It set its task as not being to prioritise work inside the working class, but to 'accumulate forces practising a broad democratic opposition, based on the radicality of the workers and the new movements and thus capable of unifying the anti-capitalist bloc' (quoted in Praxis, op. cit.).
Again, as with Lotta Continua, the old notions of the party which had contained large doses of Maoist-Stalinism were being abandoned. But what had replaced it was not a genuinely Marxist notion of the party, in which militants get together in a disciplined way to discuss what they are doing and to elect a leadership but a near-rejection of any notion of a structured organisation at all.
This approach abandons any attempt either to draw the different movements together into a common struggle, or to relate them to the only force that can win their particular demands — the passive, yet potentially revolutionary industrial working class. For, the movements are movements on the margins of society: this even applies to the women's movement (though women are the majority of the population) — it is a movement that only involves a very thin layer of working class women and is viewed with bemusement (sometimes sympathetic, sometimes hostile) by the vast mass of those it claims to represent. The notion of 'autonomy', not simply of respecting the right of those involved in the movements to make their own decisions (as if there were any choice about that), but of refusing in principle to attempt to intervene in the debates within the movements to influence the decisions taken, precludes any attempt to help the movements break out from the 'margins'.
The point can be reached where the notions of separate 'autonomous' sectors infects the revolutionary organisation itself. It drops any attempt to build a politically homogeneous organisation through debate and democratic decision making, and becomes simply a federation of different interest groups, a 'bloc' of 'youth' and the 'old', the 'trade unionists' and 'the women', 'the northerners' and 'the southerners' all taking their separate decisions: a bit like a more left wing version of the Eurocommunist British CP in which any notion of party discipline has disappeared, allowing, for instance, middle rank trade union bureaucrats to continue to behave as if the working class was exclusively male, while the radicalised women members of the same party experiment with alternative life styles.
Once you have such a situation, the revolutionary press ceases to be a real unifier of the different struggles against the system: instead it becomes a series of different sections: this one for the women, this one for the youth, this one for the 40 year old virtually full time member of the factory council, this one for the different members of the 'movement' to debate ad nauseam with one another — the only thing missing is any overall political analysis capable of reaching out beyond the 'movement' and explaining to working class activists still under reformist influence why they should struggle alongside the revolutionary left.
The picture I have just painted is an exaggerated one. But it does point to a danger facing the revolutionary organisations. In an over zealous attempt to ingratiate itself with the 'movements' (an over-reaction due to its failure to take any real account of them at an earlier stage) the organisation ceases to have anything to say which will attract their supporters away from their 'autonomous' depoliticised beliefs, and at the same time ceases also to be a force attempting to articulate the correct points in their stance to an audience inside the industrial working class.
The first time as tragedy, the second as farce: that just about sums up the way in which the Italian experience of the flight to the margins has been repeated, on a smaller scale, in other countries. In Italy there was, at least, a huge movement by the 'marginali' in 1977; there was something tangible for those recoiling at the Maoist notion of the party and leadership to throw themselves into.
In France, however, the situation was different. The Bordeaux organisation of Lutte Ouvriere which split away a few years back drifted off in something like the same direction; and much of the opposition to the pro-Lambertist trend inside the LCR is motivated by a reaction against the notion of a democratic centralist party. Yet this has been 'autonomism' without mass 'autonomous' struggles: a sure recipe for revolutionaries trying to resolve their own 'crisis of militancy' by what is little more than life style politics (sometimes dresed up as 'bridging the gap between the personal and the political').
In effect, this is a recipe for the disintegration of the revolutionary left. It means turning away from the struggle to win workers, and instead pursuing purity within existing society. Paradoxically, the end point for those who started off counterposing the 'revolutionary self-activity' of the 'autonomous' movement to the 'rigidity' of the revolutionary organisation is reformism: for the 'self-activity' is the activity of a minority trapped within the structures of capitalist society who rejoice in the ghetto in which they find themselves; without the influence of revolutionaries prepared to criticise their 'self-activity' and to point the way out of the ghetto, they will end up trying to negotiate the best terms available with the powers that be.
Sectarianism
'The development of the system of socialist sects and of the real workers movement always stand in inverse ratio to one another'. What Marx wrote to Bolte in 1871 still rings true today. Inevitably, one by-product of the down turn in the level of generalised working class struggle after the mid-1970s was a certain turn towards sectarianism. By this is meant not an insistence on revolutionary organisations arguing out their politics: this is always necessary and those who deplore it end up by merely excusing sloppy theory and practice. Real sectarianism consists in 'instead of looking among the genuine elements of the class movement for the real basis for agitation', attempting 'to prescribe their course to these elements according to a certain dogmatic recipe. . . The sect sees the justification for its existence and its "point of honour" — not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it.' (Marx to Schweitzer, 13 Oct 1868 — Marx's emphases).
Dropping into 'life style' or 'movementist' politics is one form
of sectarianiam: would be revolutionaries stop trying to relate to the
movements of the class, however small, and instead put the emphsis
on shielding their own lives or groupings from the 'backwardness' of
the class. But the sectarianism can be just as marked with those who
stick to old revolutionary organisations. They too try to insulate
themselves from the outside world. The sect preserves its identity — without putting its members to the test of any real struggle against the forces pulling the movement to the right.
No doubt, it is this which explains the attraction of the rightist sect the OCI to a good half of those inside the LCR who are still committed to party building. It may explain the way in which the Stalinist sect, the MLS has succeeded in maintaining itself, while the three larger Italian organisations have plunged into crisis. It certainly explains the success of the Trotskyist' Militant group in Britain in maintaining itself, and even growing a little, buried deep inside the Labour Party and as the right wing of the Broad Left in a couple of unions. Finally, it provides an explanation of the relative endurance of the very small sects (the small Trotskyist sects in Britain, the Bordigists in Italy): those who have never tried to storm heaven do not resent being earth-bound.
The Way out of the crisis
The European revolutionary left is in crisis. But it is certainly not dead. If it were there would have been no point in writing this article! I have located one element leading to crisis in the objective siuation we have all faced since the mid-1970s. But I have also insisted there is another element — the political stances which most of the European organisations embraced in their period of growth, 1968-74. It was a politics which, whether in its sub-Maoist or sub-Trotskyist form, was unable to cope when the easy 'truths' of those years fell apart.
To get out of the crisis (or at least to ensure that the temporary recovery noticeable in some places now is not lost the moment there is another sharp shift in the struggle) requires a theoretical, political and organisational reformation of the revolutionary left.
Theoretical One of the worst failings of the revolutionary left internationally has been a failure to use Marxism to understand the dynamic of the modern world. Certain things have been hallowed to such an extent that they never receive critical evaluation by most of the revolutionary left (that there are 'progressive' countries, that the 'working class' played a leadership role in the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, even that it is justified to talk of Eastern Europe as 'socialist', that the Cultural Revolution was intended by Mao as a real revolution, that there is 'unequal exchange' between the 'third world' and the advanced countries). 'Theory' has been left with the task of either purely academic studies or of simply interrogating oneself (exemplified in the case of Althusser where Theory, with a capital T, is not about the real world at all, but about its own status).
In Britain, this has been summed up over the years in a division of labour,whereas for much of the non-SWP left New Left Review has supplied the 'theory'; reformism, soft Guevarism, soft Maoism or soft Mandelism has supplied the 'practice'! In the Latin countries, a range of non-revolutionary thinkers like Poulantzas, Althusser, Rosana Rosanda, Samur Amin have supplied the 'theory', and the revolutionaries have then pragmatically inserted 'practice' into it.
The revolutionary left cannot afford such luxuries today. It desperately needs explanations of the invasion of Cambodia, the war between China and Vietnam, of the ever more apparent denial of elementary rights to workers in Russia; it needs a scientific appraisal of the host of 'progressive' regimes in the 'third world' that sing revolutionary hymns while torturing their own working class; it needs an analysis of the dynamic of the world economy, which goes beyond glib references to the diplomatic manoeuvring of the great powers (witness the current tendency of the soft Maoists to explain everything in terms of German imperialism) and begins to explain the economic forces which hold the rival ruling classes in their grip; finally, it needs an analysis of the working class itself, of its changing composition (the growth of allegedly non-productive white collar and service sectors, the influx of married women into the workforce, the effects of this on the working class family) and above all of the role of the reformist bureaucracy that now penetrates, partially at least, into every factory.
The soft Maoist and 'orthodox' Trotskyist organisations have failed to analyse any of these questions seriously: the journalism of Isaac Deutscher and then of Ernest Mandel is the closest most of them have come to admitting them as problems. Yet today, some answers at least to these sorts of questions are a precondition for consistent work from the revolutionary cadre.
We in the International Socialists and then the SWP have at least sketched out possible answers to some of the questions, with the theories we developed of state capitalism, the permanent arms economy, deflected revolution and 'the shifting locus of reformism' (for outline accounts of these see Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, Chris Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, Nigel Harris, The Mandate of Heaven: Marx and Mao in Modern China; Mike Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War; the various articles in International Socialism 1:61). Our answers are open to debate and certainly need updating (see the discussion in Intenational Socialism 1:100 and, of course, in the new series of IS). But the answers we have, however inadequate, have provided us with some guidelines through the turmoil of the last few years. They have enabled us to retain a confidence in a political judgement, to grasp some of the aspects of the dynamic of the system on a world scale, and to reach back to the revolutionary traditions without falling into the sectarianism or those who cross themselves before the shrine of Hunan of the tablets of 1938.
There are signs today that others are beginning to take such questioning seriously; certainly without the revival of a current of creative Marxism linked to revolutionary practice, there can be no seious escape from the impasse of the international revolutionary left.
Political Politics is the point of interaction of theory and practice. The absence of serious theory within the revolutionary left (or, what amounts to the same thing, a theory culled from Maoism, Populism, Third Worldism and, on occasions, an extremely mechanical interpretaion of certain things written by Trotsky in the 1930s) has been accompanied by a tendency to look for political substitutes for working class action when the class is in retreat — whether the substitute lies in a softness towards the left' within the trade union bureaucracy, in certain 'third world' figures, or in the 'marginal' movements. All this is justified in terms of a rejection of 'economism'.
In a downturn in the class struggle, it is the duty of revolutionary organisations to relate to all sorts of movements that develop outside the workplaces among oppressed and exploited groups. But, it has to do this while never forgetting that the agent of revolutionary change lies elsewhere. 'Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must they be smashed'. And the link with the working class movement has to be an active one, not merely a rhetorical one. The revolutionary organisation has to search out and connect with the smallest spark of working class resistence against the system, even in a period in which its own growth comes mainly from the 'marginal' areas. Otherwise it will not be able to relate to the agent of revolutionary change when it begins to stir.
In Italy, for instance, the CP has defined the workers in the big enterprises as 'its own' and the unemployed, the semi-employed and the students as 'marginal'. Sections of the revolutionary left have merely reversed the terms, seeing the large enterprises has havens of 'reformism' and 'economism', and the 'marginali' as 'the proletariat'.
You cannot, however, talk about relating to workers in the large enterprises without coming to terms with another question all too often evaded: the role of the reformist trade union bureaucracy in relation to reformist workers. There is a tendency for revolutionaries to see this merely in terms of a bureaucracy with reformist politics facing workers with revolutionary politics. In the ultra-left phase, the revolutionary instincts of the whole proletariat are always seen as about to break through the thin reformist crust; in the period of the drift to the right, a more complex, but still mistaken notion is accepted — that there is a battle of 'tendencies' within the trade union movement, with left officials and workers fighting right officials. What is not allowed for is the way in which the hierarchical structure of the trade unions themselves draw officials away from contact with the shop floor, aligning reformist officials with management against reformist workers — and aligning 'revolutionary' officials with reformist officials against workers.
It is this which allows the possibility, even in a downturn, of revolutionary workers etc. drawing reformist workers alongside them in struggle against the reformist bureaucracy. It is this which allows in an upturn the creation of rank and file groups in which revolutionary and reformist workers work together — and it is this too which means that at all points revolutionaries have to be wary of those from their ranks who become full time officials and insist that it is the rank and file party members, not just the officials, who determine the party's trade union policy.
Without some such conception of building 'rank and file groups' — however low key and however informal — around each revolutionary in a factory, trade union strategy alternates between attempts by small groups of revolutionaries to counterpose themselves to the unions as the representatives of the workers, and revolutionaries attempting to manoeuvre as part of the trade union apparatus, relying upon the 'left' in the trade union machine rather than on the movements, however limited, of the class itself.
Organisation There is often a tendency of people to counterpose politics and organisation ('it's a political, not an organisational question'); but revolutionary politics finds its embodiment in revolutionary organisation.
The international revolutionary left is still oscillating between two erroneous organisational principles: that of diluted Stalinism (sometimes called 'Marxism-Leninism'; sometimes called 'Trotskyism', but in fact going back to Zinoviev's 'Bolshevisation' of the Comintern) and that of a semi-anarchist 'anything goes' attitude (usually dressed up with talk of the need for 'autonomous' movements or for 'new forms of organisation').
The diluted Stalinist organisation is one in which the leadership (often in the form of a 'super-star' general secretary) hands down 'the line', in which the Internal Bulletin is the explanation of the leadership's latest move, and the congresses are rallies, with occasional dissident voices subordinated to the general aim of creating a favourable public image.
The 'anything goes' form of organisation is that marked by no apparent national line, by endless debates which get nowhere, and by a structure which leaves effective control in the hands of whoever happens at a particular point to have got control of the printing press or the central office. The movement' rules, without structures, without elections, without ordered agenda — and with th best placed or the most vociferous getting their way.
In the IS and the SWP we have attempted, over the years, to develop a quite different model to either of these two — a model which we think bears some similarity to the Bolshevik party before the isolation and degeneration of the Russian revolution. It is a model that recognises that a leadership is needed — the class war is after all a war, and in a war an army has to be led. But it also recognises that the personnel, and the strategies and the tactics of the leadership should not be sacrosanct, but should be open to discussion by the membership, especially after key developments in the struggle and before conferences. Only thus can the leadership be forced to maintain contact with the lived experience of struggle.
The practice of building organisations along these lines is much more difficult than the theory: in the case of the SWP we have had bitter experience of sectarian groupings exploiting the democratic structure and ruining untold branches in order to try to win members for themselves; we have also discovered the hard way that a free exchange of opinions and a free formation of platforms before conferences must be prevented by the self-discipline of all those involved from degenerating into ritualistic jousting between a 'leadership' and an 'oposition' that is reminiscent of bourgeois parliaments, (for a rather warped account of this see Martin Shaw in Socialist Register 1978; for a reply from the SWP see Duncan Hallas in Socialist Review Feb 1979.) Nevertheless, we remain convinced that only the building of organisations on these lines can prevent a continual splintering of the revolutionary vanguard between those with great revolutionary zeal but little experience, and those with great experience, but diminished zeal.
Finally, the question of organisation cannot be separated from the question of the paper. A regular revolutionary paper is essential to bind the different components of the party together. And it must not be — as so many papers produced by the revolutionary left internationally have been (examples, Rouge, Quotidiano, di Lavoratori, II Manifesto, the Red Mole) — directed at 'the movement' or the radicalised intelligentsia. It has to be a paper for the section of the working class that shows some movement, carrying news of the 'movement' certainly, but in a way that relates to worker activists. Only then can it bind the cadres to the class as well as to each other.
Revolutionary patience Neither the theoretical, political or organisational remedies we have offered would give a massive new lease of life to the revolutionary left by themselves. They are not going to get us out of the vicious circle in which workers say to us 'What is your alternative', we reply 'your class is the alternative' and they say, 'But our class doesn't care'.
The only way out of such situations is to wait for the class itself to move. That is what previous generations of revolutionaries have had to do: it is what Marx had to do after the defeat of the 1848 revolution; it is what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to do after the defeat of the 1905 revolution; it is what Rosa Luxemburg had to do in the bitter period between the outbreak of World War 1 and the first stirrings of the German revolutionary movement nearly three years later. That the class will move is not in doubt: whether it likes it or not it is the most powerful social force in a system incapable of moving in any direction without stumbling; in order to preserve the very things given it by the system in the past, the working class will again and again be forced to struggle, even if again and again it allows the struggle to die down through lack of confidence in itself as the alternative to the system.
Revolutionary patience is the order of the day. It is the only alternative to either allegedly 'transitional' but in reality reformist palliatives that suggest that something other then the self emancipation of the class can deal with the crisis of the system, or to running off in pursuit of ephemeral 'new movements'. But revolutionary patience must not be confused with sectarian passivity. It means seizing every opportunity to intervene in struggle, using those opportunities to test the organisation, to draw to it the best new activists, to build its reputations within the class, and to slowly move towards the necessary party.
The European revolutionary left has been undergoing a general crisis for the last two and a half years. In country after country the largest organisations have been paralysed by political confusion, leading in many cases to splits, in some to complete disintegration.
The crisis first manifested itself in the country in which the revolutionary left grew to its greatest strength in the mid-1970s — Italy. At the height of its influence it claimed 30,000 adherents, three daily papers, dozens of radio stations, half a dozen MPs.
Then, in 1976, after the general elections of 20 June, each of the three major organisations plunged into crisis. The national secretary and a substantial minority of the leadership of Avanguardia Operaia split from that organisation on a programme that was at least semi-reformist. The two constituent parts of the PDUP-Manifesto organisation split apart — the minority eventually to join the majority of AO (to form Democrazia Proletaria), the majority to merge with the AO minority. And the third organisation, Lotta Continua consciously dissolved its organisation into the* wider 'movement', remaining only as a paper. (For a partial account in English of these events, see Italy 1977-8, published by Red Notes, henceforth cited as "Italy").
In France, the biggest revolutionary organisation (although not the one with the biggest base in the factories) the Fourth International's LCR has been divided down the middle on whether to move towards unity with the right wing 'Trotskyist' sect, the OCI (the 'Lambertists') arid has abandoned its daily paper. (The pro-Lambertist tendency got 38-5 per cent of the votes, the anti 39 per cent — Combate (Madrid) 8 February 1979). A smaller, but by no means insignificant organisation, the OCT, (formerly "Revolution"), which had apparently strengthened itself through fusion, promptly split losing about a third of its members and most of its momentum in 1977-8.
In Sweden the organisation Furbundet Kommunist has developed an orientation which mercilessly criticises its own past positions as 'leftist' and 'economist', and which calls for a 'left' government committed to 'structural reforms'. One of the leading figures of the Danish Kommunistisk Forbund, Bent Moos, has developed an orientation which points in the same direction.
In Spain what was one of the most rapidly growing organisations in 1976-7, the OK", underwent a series of traumatic crises in the period after the June 1977 elections: its general secretary, Fabrigas, who had been the dominating influence in the organisation, split to join the Catalan branch of the Socialist Party; successive splits to the 'left' took most of its activists in Barcelona, Zaragosa and the Balearic's; what remained then dissolved itself into the semi-Maoist Movimiento Communista after self criticism of he QIC's traditions by its leadership which denounced its past 'leftism', the theoretical influence on it of "Trotsky' and its failure to understand 'Marxism-Leninism', (see Acerca del Proceso de rectification by the Comite Federal de la OIC, 8 Nov 78, and, for the point of view of some members who split to the left. Las raziones de nuestra separation de la OIC, Zaragosa, S Nov 78). There are also reports (of unknown reliability) that the biggest Fourth International section, the (Spanish) I.CR. is plagued by many of the controversies that have been paralysing its French equivalent.
In Portugal, little seems to remain of the movement that could briefly outflank the CP to the left in 1975 and deliver 17 percent of th popular vote to Major Otelo da Carvalho in the presidential election of 1976.
It is important to stress that these political crises are far from destroying the international revolutionary left. The movement is still far bigger than it was a dozen years ago. As one Italian commentator has noted, the 'crisis of Marxism' has been a "crisis of growth' (Praxis, February 1979). Nevertheless, a crisis it is. It threatens to paralyse the activity of many tens of thousands of revolutionaries, and to stop advantage being taken of the many opportunities which exist for building a revolutionary current in the workplaces. An understanding of the roots of the crisis is essential to revolutionaries everywhere. Those who do not learn its lessons may well live to suffer them.
Background: The growth of the revolutionary left 1968- 76
The revolutionary left internationally emerged in the years 1967-69. Previously its numbers had been miniscule and its real impact tiny. In France its total membership before the May events was, at the outside, 2000; in Britain revolutionaries used to joke that any organisation that grew to the 500 mark was bound then to split and disintegrate; in Itaiythe future foundersof AC) were, asmembersof the Fourth International's (iruppi Communisti Revoluzionari so deeply embedded in the Communist Party as to be invisible; in Spain too the future components of the revolutionary left were still encapsulated in the CP, ETA, the Guevarist FLP or the Catholic workers' organisations. In the space of little more than a couple of years, these scarcely visible embryos were very vigorous and noisy, even if still small, intruders into the established political network.
In France and Italy it numbered tens of thousands of adherents by 1970; in Spain it had grown to roughly the same size by the death of Franco in 1975; and even in miserable Britain with its suffocating reformist traditions, the IS (now the SWP) could claim approaching 4(XX) adherents by the end of 1974.
But the growth of the revolutionary left was not a result of its own efforts alone. It was a reflection of more profound social and economic developments of those years. This was the period in which the long drawn out boom conditions of the 1950s and 1960s began to give way to the crisis conditions of the 1970s, the boom had as a by-product undercut many of the institutional forms the various European ruling classes had used to control the mass of the population: industrialisation in Southern Europe destroyed much of the peasantry and with it the ability of priests to dominate politics; the new, young, urban workers were not nearly as intimidated by the police as had been their rural parents; women ceased to be a force for conservatism as they too were sucked into industry (in Britain, only 21 -7 per cent of married women worked in 1951; by 1971 the figure was twice as high, 42-2 percent and by 1976 490 per cent).
What this meant was that in 1968 in France, in 1969 in Italy and in Spain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, movements could develop among whole layers of workers which the ruling class did not have the institutional means to check. Gaullism was impotent when faced with the May general strike in France; the formerly Catholic unions in France and Italy had veered away from control by the church; the children of the most fanatical supporters of Franco in the 1930s, the Carlists of Pamplona, waged an almost insurrectionary general strike in 1973.
In Northern Europe the process was rather different in form. But in Britain at least the outcome was somewhat similar — successive outbreaks of militant action over wages and in defence of shop floor organisation that the existing institutions seemed unable to control.
Unable to hold these movements in check, the various ruling classes all too often were tempted to use direct repression against them: the use of the CRS riot police by de Gaulle in France, the threatened military coups in Italy in the early 1970s, the inevitable intervention of the Civil Guards and the Armed Police into Spanish dustrial disputes under Franco; the increasing resort by the Heath government to the Special Patrol Group. But repression alone was rarely able to smash the new economic militancy. It usually only served to give it a new and a more political dimension.
A final, additional factor helped the revolutionary left to gain from this situation: what we in the IS referred to at the time as 'the vacuum on the left'. The reformist organisations were, by and large, incapable of reacting to the sudden upsurge in working class struggle and consciousness. Their whole political stance focussed their attention on what was happening within the established political structures; they saw the workers' movement as no more than a means for putting pressure on these; it was to be kept going by a routine round of activities, carefully supervised from above and never allowed to take on a life of its own.
For the Communist Parties, this still meant maintaining an inflexible, closed oppositional Stalinist stance which, however, never challenged the system; their 'strategy' was to bide their time until there was an electoral majority for a 'left government' in France and Italy, until a 'pacific' general strike brought about 'national reconciliation' in Spain, in Britain the perennial talk of 'left advance' and 'alternative economic policies'. Social democracy was in an even worse state: the French party had discredited itself by its support for the colonial war in Algeria and its participation in de Gaulle's 1958 government; the Italian party had lost support and credibility through participation in coalition government with the Christian democrats; the British party had disillusioned many of its own activists through its imposition of wage controls and its attempt to put legal constraints on the unions; the Spanish party was made up of exiles who seemed unable to stir themselves to build an underground organisation; and the Portuguese party barely existed until the early 1970s.
As workers were drawn into wages struggles, demonstrations, political strikes, occupations, the revolutionaries were often the only section of the left to respond to the possibilities. Suddenly, their leaflets and their papers were being enthusiastically accepted and read by at least some working class activists. There were occasions when they had only to raise their red banners, and thousands would march behind them. It was possible for groups that had built themselves from dozens to hundreds through participation in student struggles now to draw in thousands of workers.
Not all the revolutionary groups managed to grow: some were too tainted by the sectarianism that had inured them to isolation of the pre-1968 period, others fell so much in love with the student movement that they never bothered about the factories — they went on complaining of the dangers of 'economism' until it was too late for them to make their presence felt.
Yet, in general the revolutionary left could flourish. And its own political ideas did not seem to make much difference to its success or failure in doing so. So in Italy the dominant trend was semi-Maoist, whether with Lotta Continua or with Avanguardia Operaia; in Spain Maoists and Trotskyists alike flourished; in France three rival Trotskyist groups and the semi-Maoist OCT dominated the scene by the mid-7()s. In Britain it was the "state capitalist" IS (now the SWP) which became dominant.
The revolutionary left everywhere had grown from strength to strength in the six or seven years after 1968. Its expectation was that it would continue to grow from strength to strength.
In Britain, as we watched the miners bring down the Heath government, we waited for a massive accretion in our strength as, after a few months of 'honeymoon' with Labour, the working class movement would explode in a 'big bang'. In the SWP our formations were not as absurdly optimistic as those who wrote, in the Fourth International's paper Red Weekly, of 'the road to dual power'. Yet we did expect a rapid resurgence of struggle. 'A period of lull in the class struggle is inevitable. But such is the severity of the economic crisis that this 'honeymoon' between the trade unions and the Labour government will be much shorter than in 1964-6. 'This time it will be a matter of months not years' (IS National Committee Report, Internal Bulletin April 1974); even a 'rightist' oppositional grouping inside our organisation thought that the 'honeymoon' would end 'a little later rather than sooner, but it cannot be long delayed' (Document in April 1974 Internal Bulletin by Duncan Hallas, Jim Higgins, John Palmer, and Roger Protz).
And, in practice, we behaved as if the near exponential growth of the previous period was going to continue. The round of activities and meetings remained at the same tempo as in the upsurge years of 1969, 1971, 1972 and 1973-4. We set targets for paper sales and for membership that assumed that nothing had changed.
By European standards, we in Britain were profoundly conservative in our perspective in 1974. In Italy, in the run up to the June 1976 election, virtually the whole revolutionary left believed (1) that they would get a substantial vote and many MPs for their joint list, and (2) that the election would give rise to a 'left' government which would lead Italy into a rerun of the Chilean experience under Allende, but this time with a happy ending.
The same expectations were general in Spain in the period up to Franco's demise. The LCR spoke of a maturing prerevolutionary situation' (its mentor, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International had been speaking in this sense since 1969 — see its 'Curta' in Accion Communista no. 14, Nov 1972). And for their part 'Marxist-Leninist' organisations still talked of the need to take up the teachings of Mao Tse Tung and prepare for 'people's war'.
In-F ranee, the wild optimism that had existed in 1968 had died down in the early 1970s — and with it the influence of the various Maoist and spontaneist groups who had most embodied it. Nevertheless, sections of the revolutionary left continued to behave as if their actions alone could transform the political situation — as in 1973 when the LCR fell for a government provocation and battled it out for hours with a vast array of riot police protecting a miniscule fascist meeting. The optimism persisted in the illusion in 1976-78 that the election of a 'worker government' made up of the CP and the Socialist Party would produce a huge upturn in the class struggle. 'For a longer or shorter period . . . there would be a period of enthusiasm, or real mobilisation of the working class with enormous illusions.' (Alain Krivine, in Revolution 2 July '76). The same beliefs in the immense possibilities of the left taking office in France are repeated in Ernest Mandel's book on Eurocommunism.
The roots of the crisis: (I) The temporary restabilisation of bourgeois institutions
The expectations of the revolutionary left look absurd in retrospect. They did not seem so absurd at the time. For the first time since the 1920s new revolutionary organisations had grown up, independent of both Social Democracy and Stalinism, just as workers struggles were rising to new heights. And all this, just as capitalism plunged into by far its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.
Be that as it may, it was the failure of these expectations to find fulfillment that led straight into the crisis of the revolutionary left. In Italy the elections of 20 June 1976 failed either to produce a 'left government' or to give the revolutionary left more than a couple of per cent of the poll: within a month people were talking of a 'crisis of the revolutionary left'.
The revolutionary left failed to take account of several factors. The first was the adaptability of existing institutions, especially of the reformist organisations within the working class movement. We have seen how in 1968-9 the reformist parties and the unions failed to react to the sudden upsurge of struggle. But that paralysis did not last all that long. Even the ultra-rigid French CP did make some use of the May events, 'running to the front' in order to direct some of the energy into strengthening its base in the factories. The Italian CP was more adept at taking advantage of the new militancy of 1969. Under its influence the trade union bureaucracy created new, apparently democratic organisational forms, factory councils (roughly equivalent to shop stewards committees) in ordci in ih.m many of the best spontaneous militants in the factories into its orbit In Spain the CP's caution could leave it very much on the sidelines in great struggles like the Pamplona or Vitoria general strikes; but it was still capable of building the workers commissions into the most powerful and most respected union federation.
In Portugal, the Stalinist CP which had cheerfully broken strikes in the summer of 1474 and which had been among the first of the CPs to remove from its programme references to the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', was just as willing to take up an apparently militant stance after it had been removed from the government in the late summer of 1975.
In Italy, Spain and France the turn to 'Eurocommunism' was also in part an attempt to open the party up to new forces. Although its prime purpose was to reassure the local ruling classes that the CPs would not betray their interests to Moscow, it also enabled the leaders to say to a whole array of leftist intellectuals that there was room for them. A new climate of tolerance inside the parties was promised to those who would not have thought of joining in 1968-9.
However, the transformation of Stalinism was child's play compared with what took place in the case of social democracy.
In France the old Socialist Party, the SFIO, had received an ignominious 6 per cent of the votes in the 1969 presidential election. But after a series of manoeuvres it was reborn in a completely new-form in 1971. The new party made every possible attempt to stress its discontinuity with the old; its leader Francois Mitterand had never been a member of the old party and the new party did not shy away from a certain 'left wing' rhetoric reabsorbing many of the leaders of the left reformist PSLJ. It made great play of workers' participation and openly sought alliances with the Communist Party. It cultivated relations with the former Catholic union federation, the CFDT. which had gained a reputation for leftism' in 1968, rather than with the SFIO's old ally, the FO union federation (a Cold War split from the CGT with much of the reputation one would expect from such origins). The result was a remarkable renaissance for social democracy in France. It has not succeeded in taking over from the CP as being the party of the industrial proletariat: but its vote has overtaken that of the CP, and it claimed in 1976 to have 958 workplace cells.
In Portugal, a mixture of money from the ruling ( ierman social democrats and an ambiguous politics that seemed to mean all things to all people in 1974 (including in the first lew months alter the overthrow of fascism a willingness to be 'to the left' of the CI' on certain issues), enabled the Portuguese Socialist Party to rise out of nothing to become that country's biggest party. Here, however, its policies lost it most of its active support in the radical Southern part of the country by the autumn of 1975; its attempts to set up rival union federations to that of the Communists enjoyed little success outsidesthe white collar field — and there it had to work both with the openly bourgeois parties and with right wing Maoist sects.
The Soares phenomenon in Portugal was soon followed by the Gonzales phenomenon in Spain. Here again, money from West European social democracy, plus the media, plus a toleration of certain left phrases, enabled the Socialist Party, the PSOE, not only to grab more votes than the CP, but also to scoop its social democratic rivals, even where they had a better record of struggle than itself. It did manage to set up a credible union federation, the UGT, even though. this had played virtually no role in the underground struggle against Francoism.
In Britain, there has been no great regrowth of social democratic politics. That has been ruled out by the experience of Labour in power for 11 of the last 15 years. The Labour vote in February 1974 was the lowest since the 1930s, and the Labour party membership has been in continual decline for 25 years. Until a couple of years ago droves of activists were still leaving the party in disillusionment, although there are a few indications that this trend might have been reversed since.
However, in the first half of the seventies, the decline of political social democracy was paralleled by an increased flexibility on the part of the trade union bureaucracy. Union membership expanded and a number of key unions were taken over by figures associated with the 'broad left'. Union leaders consciously set out to develop mechanisms that would tie shop stewards more closely into the running of the union. The strikes of 1968-70 had tended to be unofficial; not so the great strikes of 1971-4.
Overall, the vacuum on the left was not nearly as marked by the mid-70s as it had been in the late 1960s. Institutions aimed at tying workers to bourgeois society had to a very large extent filled the void, and the revolutionary left began to find the going hard. So, for example, although the crisis for the revolutionary left did not break until 1976 in Italy, certain symptoms were visible in 1972-3. In Spain conditions were already ripe enough at the end of 1974 for two thirds of the membership of one of the semi-Maoist groups, Bandiera Roja, to rejoin the CP (ex-members of that group are central in the Eurocommunist wing of the party in Barcelona).
The roots of the crisis: (2) the attitude of workers
To recognise the considerable efforts made by reformists of all hues to integrate the new activism of workers is not, by itself, an explanation of why the revolutionary left found itself out in the cold after 1975-6. You also have to explain why workers were prepared to see their struggles restricted within the limits prescribed by the reformists. Why did the workers movement in Britain which had rejected wage controls in 1969 and 1972-4, accept them in 1975-78? Why did Spanish workers in general accept the pact of Moncloa? (The Spanish equivalent of the Social Contract). Why did Italian workers bow down before a Christian democrat government which had passive CP support? Why did Portuguese workers allow Social Democrat led governments to bring to an end the movement that had threatened the whole future of Portuguese capitalism in 1975?
There is one set of explanations for all these phenomena simply in terms of a 'new flowering of reformist illusions'. In the 1968-75 period, it is said, revolutionaries failed to understand the peculiar features of western society, with the strong commitment of its workers to democratic forms. Once you understand this, it is then argued, you can see that the left will never reach the widest layers of the working class unless it relates to the reformist organisations and is well established on the parliamentary terrain.
One version of this argument is, of course, that put by Eurocommunist refugees from the lecture halls of '68. A slightly more sophisticated version is contained in the 'left Eurocommunist' theories of thinkers like the former member of the leadership of the Spanish CP, Claudin, and one of II Manifesto's leaders in Italy, Magri. (For further details see the articles by Phil Spencer and Colin Barker in this issue of International Socialism). Even some of the revolutionary left has developed its own version of the theory; see for instance the various texts from the Fourth International in the last three or four years, e.g. Ernest Mandel's book on Eurocommunism.
Yet, despite its wide popularity, none of the various versions really fits the facts. For, the crisis of the revolutionary left has not been accompanied by any huge flowering of social democracy, Stalinism or Eurocommunism. The passing over to rformism of a few former would be revolutionaries is not the same thing as the growth of widespread belief within the working class that its redemption is at hand from reformist leaders.
In Britain, as mentioned above, the period of stagnation for the revolutionary left followed the lowest social democratic vote for 40 years. In Italy and France, the revolutionary left began to tear itself apart after an election in which the electoral hopes of reformists as well as revolutionaries received a battering. In Portugal, by the time the Soares government turned the tide against the revolution, it itself had very little solid support within the core working class areas (it is pure mythology to pretend, as some adherents of the Fourth International line do, that there were large working class demonstrations in its support in Lisbon in the autumn of 1975). Even in Spain , where one would expect 40 years of Francoism to have led workers to greet democratisation with enthusiasm, there are already signs of disillusionment with bourgeois democracy (for instance the large number of abstentions in the referendum on the constitution).
A 'growth of illusions in reformism' is, at best, a very inadequate explanation of the forces which derailed the hopes of the revolutionary left.
A better starting point is to be found in certain comments made by Trotsky in 1921 —at aprevious time when the first wild hopes of a new revolutionary movement seemed to have come to an impasse internationally. He made some acute observations on how the working class reacts to a sudden turn to the worse in the economic situation.
'The political effects of a crisis are determined by the entire political situation and by those events which precede and accompany the crisis, especially the battles, successes or failures of the working class itself prior to the crisis. Under one set of circumstances the crisis might give a mighty impulse to the revolutionary activity of the working masses; under a different set of circumstances it may completely paralyse the offensive of the proletariat
Prolonged unemployment following a period of revolutionary political assaults and retreats does not at all work in favour of the Communist Party. On the contrary, the longer the crisis lasts, the more it threatens to nourish anarchist moods on one wing and reformist moods on the other." (Hirst Five Years of the Communist International, vol.11 p. 7ft and p. 82)
Economic crisis leads to attacks on workers living standards and jobs. To that extent it increases their bitterness; as they join the dole queue workers who never before questioned the system at all can develop a bitter loathing of everything to do with it. But the crisis also does something else as well: it makes workers with jobs much more wary about entering into struggle. After all, their jobs might be at stake.
This rarely affects them today, as it might have in pre war slumps, through the direct fear that management will sack them and replace them by new personnel from the dole queues. Traditions of union organisation are usually too strong for management even to try that. More insidious mechanisms, however, are at work. These make the individual worker feel that his or her job depends upon the viability of the particular chunk of the system in which they find themselves. Protecting their living standards and working conditions, they are told, will increase the crisis that besets their factory, firm or nation and destroy its ability to provide jobs. The same argument is presented as a more general ideological argument by the media: such is the crisis in society that any sustained struggle over wages, working conditions or hours will push it over the edge not an abys.
Workers can resist this argument. But only if either they have a general political understanding that a viable alternative exists to the present crisis-prone set-up; or if they are so embittered that they are prepared to struggle no matter what the odds are so long as there is some prospect of success.
This enables us to see how workers were willing to struggle during the period of the Heath government in Britain, before the Italian Communist Party gave its blessing to the Andreotti government, until the Moncloa Pact in Spain. The established reformist leaders of the class indicated that there was an alternative to the existing, crisis-prone set-up: the hoisting of themselves into office. Here was a very visible generalised political alternative with which every worker who had a grievance could identify. He or she did not have to have any great illusions in what the reformist leaders could deliver. What mattered is that a direction was indicated that could link the individual grievance with a general sense of movement.
This alternative focus was removed by the policy of at least half-collaboration with the governments by the reformist leaders in Italy and Spain, the defeat of the left in the French elections, the endorsement of the social contract by the 'left' trade union leaders in Britain, the collapse of the radical sections of the Portuguese army on 25 November 1975. This would not have mattered had there been a huge spontaneous upsurge of anger and struggle. Out of that the class would have begun to create at least the embryo of its own alternative. Nor would it have mattered if the revolutionary left had been a massive force, capable of appearing as a credible alternative. But in the situation as it existed, there was no credible alternative to the mass of workers between what the reformists offered and seemingly endless crisis.
The reformists offered virtually nothing in the way of reforms. As the economic crisis deepened their language became closer and closer to that of the ruling class. There was little positive in it for workers to have illusions in. What the reformists were effectively doing was tying workers to the measures proposed by the main sections of the ruling class. Workers went along with this — some sections even to the extent of abandoning the reformists themselves for the openly capitalist parties — because however miserable an option it was, it seemed the only viable option. If there was a revival of reformism among the most advanced sections of workers, it was not through illusions in some great new world offered by the reformist leaders, but because of a lack of faith in any revolutionary alternative.
This particularly affected many of the worker militants who had been prepared to work with, or even join, the revolutionary left in I he earlier period. Then it had often seemed that an alternative lav in (he sheer spontaneity of the workers struggles themselves. Now that was no longer the case. Long drawn out, consistent. Minimised activity was necessary just to maintain elementary forms ol class organisation. And in carrying on this sort of activity, the lower reaches of the reformist bureaucracy were often more helpful than the revolutionary left. Their bureaucratic routines could seem more 'practical' than the revolutionary fervour of the extreme left. They could link the individual militant with a whole network of other activists who could aid him or her. They could provide access to elected office within the ranks of the bureaucracy itself. And they did not demand of the individual militant that he or she argue out a political case day after day that meant clashing with fellow workers, since the bureaucracy's own ideology is very close to the 'common sense' conception drummed into workers by capitalist society.
It is this state of affairs, rather than any great blooming of reformist illusions, that explains the way in which in France the Socialist Party, the CFDT and even the CP have been able to recruit loriner sympathisers of the revolutionary left; the way that in Italy t lie re was the phenomenon of 're-entry' into the CP of ex-rcvolutionaries three or four years ago; the way that in Spain many former revolutionaries who were active under the most dangerous conditions during the Franco period have dropped out, or even moved towards reformism, now that Franco has gone for good; the way that in Britain there has been a steady trickle of activists away horn the revolutionary left towards reformist, 'broad left' activity even to the extent that the younger intellectual cadre of the CP is made up largely of individuals who claimed once upon a time to be revolutionaries.
The roots of the crisis: (3) The 'crisis of militancy'
The revitalisation of the reformist organisations and the changed mood of the class do not by themselves explain why the revolutionary left has been thrown into crisis. Two additional factors are important — one subjective, to do with the motivations ol the cadre of the revolutionary organisations, the other political. There is no doubt that an important factor in the crises of the i evolutionary left in France, Italy and Spain has been what has been tailed 'the crisis of militancy'. By the mid 1970s much of the cadre of the revolutionary organisations had been involved in non-stop activity for seven, eight or even ten years. They had come to politics on the barricades in 1968-9 and had hardly stopped moving since. I >av after day, week after week, year after year they sold papers, produced bulletins, stood outside factories, argued over minor programmatic points. This did not seem to matter when the movement was going from strength to strength. But when the forward momentum was checked, much of the activity seemed to lose its point.
The 'tiredness' became most marked in Italy after the elections of June 1976, in Spain after the consolidation of the post-Franco regime, in Britain after the downturn in the class struggle in 1975 (the number of strikes fell to the lowest level for 10 years in 1976) and again with the relative downturn in the struggle after the defeat of the firemen's strike at the beginning of 1978.
The mood created, in some cases, a sort of 'rebellion' among the members against the demands of the organisations. In France there was even an example in 1977 of one branch of the LCR going on strike (i.e. refusing to pay subs, attend meetings, sell the paper or read the internal bulletin) until the leadership allowed shorter hours of activity! At the traumatic Lotta Continua conference of 1976, the demand developed, according to an official summary, that 'one's own existence and condition in society should be recognised as the basis for one's own participation in the construction of the revolutionary party' (quoted Italy 1977-8 p.83): the feeling existed that 'activity' for many militants consisted of selling papers and handing out leaflets from the outside to struggles that did not concern their own lives.
Such moods have undoubtedly been most prevalent among those from the student milieu from 1968. They have either been outside the struggles they had to worry about, or they were 'industrialised', bearing a voluntary burden in the factory. Once the struggle takes a down turn, it is all too tempting to drop that burden, in a way which is not so open to those born into the working class.
But the mood has affected 'real' workers as well. In a few cases it has led them to take escape routes from the factory into courses in higher education, into teaching trade union courses, etc; more often it led them to the easy temptation of adopting semi-reformist attitudes that open up the way to near full time trade union activity.
The personal tiredness of many of the 1968 generation of revolutionary cadre is a general feature throughout Europe. No organisation has been immune to it. However, that does not mean that a crisis of the revolutionary left has been inevitable. The reason crises have developed in certain organisations has been because their politics did not enable them to cope with the tired attitudes of some of their members. A leader of Lotta Continua wrote at the end of 1976, 'revolutionaries have taken the results of the 20 June general election as a defeat — even a personal defeat — although it was not seen like this by the great mass of people' (quoted in Italy 1977-8 p.82). But that was at least in part because of what the politics of the Italian revolutionary left was before 1976.
Roots of the crisis: (4) The politics of the revolutionary left
The political traditions of the European revolutionary left flow from two different main sources.
The first originates in Maoism and/or Guevarism. This was the tradition of AO and Lotta Continua in Italy, of the MC, the ORT, th PTE and Bandiera Roja in Spain; of the UDP and (in its Guevarist form) of the PRP-BR in Portugal.
Usually the Maoism is diluted. The 'orthodox' or 'hard' 'ML' Maoist groups have not generally worn very well (although large organisations still clinging to the orthodoxy survive in Spain, Germany and Scandinavia). But a whole host of vaguely Maoist notions continue to befuddle the political thinking of the major chunk of the European left.
Typically, the 1974 AO Congress spoke of the need to learn from the experience of the Chinese Communist Party; the Lotta Continua Congress of December 1974 'officially adopted a Leninist type of statute (actually modelled on the statute of the Chinese Communist Party)' (Italy 1977-8 p. 110); and the Spanish Movimiento Commumsta still speaks of the need for a party which 'assimilates, applies and develops Marxism-Leninism, enriched by the contributions of Mao Tse Tung and by the experiences of the international revolutionary movement.' (Hacia La Unidad, Documentos para la Preparacion del Congresso extraordinario de unification, MC-OIC, December 1978).
Exactly what 'learning from Mao Tse Tung' has meant has varied considerably from organisation to organisation. But the following elements are common to the political practice of most of th 'soft Maoist' (and 'soft Guevarist') organisations.
1.A strong trend of 'third worldism', which sees the role of'oppressed people' or even 'oppressed countries' in fighting imperialism as being as important for achieving socialism as the role of the working class. Hence continual talk of the need for 'alliances with (undefined) progressive countries'. This trend cut very much
with the grain in the late sixties and early seventies when it was a case of the Vietnamese fighting US imperialism or the Angolans fighting Portuguese, South African and US imperialism. It does not have much to say today when the Vietnamese are fighting the Chinese,the Ethiopians the Eritreans etc.
2. Following very much from (1) a strong strand of 'populism' —i.e. seeing the revolutionary class as being not necessarily theworkers, but a vague entity called 'the people'. Hence, one of the leaders of AO declared in 1975, "there are parts of the world where the historical role given to the working class by Marx are functions today developed in other social groups. . .' (Massimo Gorla translated in Revolutionary Politics Today: A debate between AO and IS", in IS 84 p. 16) "What is meant by proletarian elements is workers and peasants. . .' (ibid, p. 13).
Once other classes than the workers are accepted as playing a key role in the "third world' it is not difficult for some revolutionary organisations to apply the same notion to the advanced countries. Hence in announcing that it was going to merge into the Movimiento Communista, the Spanish OIC declared that "the proletariat and the people are objectively revolutionary classes' ("Manifesto Ideologico de la OIC", in Boletin Interna, 6 Deciembre, 1978). One leader of Lotta Continua has gone as far a sto speak of 'the proletariat' as "all those sectors who, having been invested by the strength and the contents of the workers struggles over the past few years, have now found, or are beginning to find, the path towards their own autonomous growth as a movement and a mass organisation: the unemployed, the state and local
government employees, the young people, the soldiers, the social struggle etc. . .' (Guido Viale, quoted at length in Italy 1977-8 p.84).
3 A certain desire to return to what the CPs were like 'before revisionism took them over' — whether this is seen as having occurred in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s. There is a tendency to identify the 'Marxist-Leninist' organisational form with the form of the Stalinised parties of those years. Partly this is because of the impact of Maoism. Partly also it is a certain nostalgia — in Italy for the armed struggle of the CP-led resistance, in Spain for the time when the CP was certainly not soft.
In practice, the result has been organisational forms which allow virtually no participation of the members of the organisation in (he discussions about its politics and direction. Congresses are dominated by the platform (I was amazed as a visitor to the 1974 AO Congress to find the whole of the first session devoted to a three hour speech by the general secretary), with no debate developing between different positions or resolutions. Internal bulletins (where they exist) merely print the documents of the leadership, not disagreements. There is a tendency for the general secretary of the p.iiiv lo be seen as the 'leader'. It has to be stressed that this style of onducting organisations in the name of 'Marxism-Leninism' developed even where there was a nominal commitment to a i nii|iie of Stalinism, as for instance in AO.
•
4 A final characteristic of most of these organisations, at least in ilieu early phase of development was a certain 'triumphalist' ultralefItism. They were very much a product of the mood created by the cultural revolution in China, the victories of the Vietnamese over the Americans, the spread of urban guerrilla-ism in Latin America and the May events in France. It is a mood which proclaimed 'victory is certain', and which downplayed both the importance of defeats and the power of reformism.
In the case of Lotta Continua, for example, its line until well into the early 1970s was that the trade unions were the principle instruments by which the CP could regain its control over the workers' movement. At the beginning, it also included factory councils in this view. It refused to intervene in either, and raised the slogan 'we are all delegates' at a time when the real battle was over the attempt of the trade union bureaucracy to integrate the councils into its structure.
AO's attitude was more complex. It recognised that the unions had great power, but instead of waging a struggle inside the existing trade unions, it called for the creation of revolutionary unions. When it came to form Base Groups in the factories (CUBs) it was never clear whether these were simply groups of revolutionaries, or groupings attempting to involve other workers who were in the unions in a struggle against the line of the CP and the union bureaucracy.
The other main current within the international revolutionary left was that deriving from Trotskyism: the French and Spanish LCRs, and the two French organisations not connected to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, Lutte Ouvriere and the Organisation Communiste International (usually referred to as the Lambertists).
On the face of it, the Fourth International and the Lambertisls stood on ground completely different to that of the soft, third worldist, populist-Maoists. Their traditions claimed to go back, not to the great helmsman, but to the first four congresses of the Communist International and Trotsky's critique of Stalinism.
Yet, in practice, the differences were not always that great. Trotsky's would-be heirs were afflicted by much of the same political and theoretical confusions as the soft Maoists. 'Orthodox Trotskyism' had proved unable in the 1940s and 1950s to come to terms either with the long drawn-out boom of the western economies or, more importantly, with the victories of Stalinist type parties in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Despite the fact that the working class had not been responsible for any of these victories, they accepted analyses thill described them as 'workers states' (for a fuller analysis of these points see Duncan Hallas, "Building the Leadership". IS 40 (old series)).
It was not a far step from this to seeing themselves in much the same way as the soft Maoists did, as part of world wide movement towards socialism embracing all sorts of forces that had nothing to do with the working class. If AO and MC praised 'comrade Mao', the Fourth International could write lovingly of 'comrade Fidel', lor the Fourth International, as for the Maoists, the Vietnamese Communist Party became a 'socialist', a 'workers party'. Indeed, in ihe early 1960s a section of the Fourth International leadership even developed a theory that had Algeria as a 'workers and peasants government'.
With a 'theory' that separated off the achievement of socialism from the self emancipation of the working class, it was not surprising that the Trotskyists' had a habit of adopting practices that downgraded the importance of the class as well. Prior to 1968 this meant an adaptation towards left reformism, whether, as in Italy through entry into the Communist Party so deep as to become invisible, or in this country through publishing a paper jointly with a number of left Labour MPs.
However, the blossoming of the student movement internationally pulled at least a section of the International away from this particular strategy. Now they joined in the student movement enthusiastically, adopting its slogans, carrying with it portraits of Che Guevara, rejoicing in the general rhetoric — and loretting to a very large extent about the working class. In this country, for example, they adopted the idea that revolutionaries should create 'red bases' in the universities.
What was common to both the soft Maoists and the would be 'orthodox Trotskyists' was substitutionism: the idea that some other force could substitute itself for the working class in the creation of socialism. While the movement was on the up in Italy or France or Spain (or Britain, for that matter) this was not necessarily that apparent. Workers were in motion, and you had to be a fool not to ielate to them (although, as always, there were a fair number of tools). But when, from the mid 1970s onwards the movement was checked, the substitutionism could easily lead revolutionaries to look to false gods — to the trade union bureaucracy, to liberal democracy, to armed lunacy, or even to changes in their own life styles.
Moving to the right: (1) the soft maoists
There was, as we have seen, a change in the mood of workers as the economic crisis grew deeper and reformist leaders started giving open or covert support for government measures. The shift in the centre of political discussion to the right affected the wide layers of workers who were not particularly active in the workers' movement and who had only partially ever broken from the 'ruling ideas' inculcated in them at school and pumped out by the media.
Their 'common sense' attitudes shifted to the right. This in turn exercised a powerful pressure on those militants who previously had been prepared to go along with much of what the revolutionary left said. The mood in the factories was such that faced with a wage claim it became 'more practical' to talk in terms of productivity payments than in terms of across-the-board rises; when faced with threatened redundancies it was 'more practical' to go into 'viability discussions' with management rather than to raise the demand 'occupy, nationalise'; faced with a national unemployment level of a million plus and a national inflation rate anywhere between 10 and 25 per cent, it seemed more 'reasonable' to argue about trading off wage controls for 'alternative economic policies' or 'social investment plans' rather than to call for the overthrow of the system.
In the earlier period, many militants with vaguely reformist ideas has been prepared to go much further than the reformist leaders in the struggle for economic demands that the leaders claimed, half heartedly, to support. Now the same militants themselves often voiced the reformist arguments in the factories.
The members of the revolutionary organisations suddenly found themselves isolated. For reasons they could not quite fathom they were no longer going from success to success. Their papers sales were stagnating or falling; there was little response to their calls for solidarity with particular groups of workers who were fighting; some worker members were dropping out of their organisations.
The easiest response for the revolutioary organisations in this situation was to swim with the rightward moving tide themselves. In case after case, the organisations — especially the organisations that had been previously marred by a 'leftist' dismissal of the structures of the reformist Labour movement — shifted their own policies to the right. In some cases the shift was so radical as to mean the abandonment of a revolutioary perpective for a reformist or semi-reformist one.
The move to the right was already apparent in Italy in 1974. The CP had gained control over the factory councils in the years previously, and the student movement had gone into a (temporary) decline: the revolutionary left was losing its basis of support. Mass movements had continued through these years over a variety of issues: inflation, unemployment, housing, democratisation of the police, prisons and the army. Frequently they mobilised tens of thousands of people, prepared to engage in the most militant tactics, initiated by the revolutionary left. Yet there was no
significant accretion of strength to the revolutionaries: the workers they mobilised continued to support the Communist Party politically. (This was shown very clearly in the 1975 and 1976 elections when the revolutionary left got only 1-5 per cent of the vote, despite the huge demonstrations they had recently been capable of leading).
The reaction to the right was most marked in the case of the II Manifesto group. They were led by former leading Communist intellectuals who in 1969 had split from the CP to the left under the impact of the mass movement and of events internationally, and had then merged with the remnants of a previous left split from the Socialist Party (which had particular strength in certain sections of the lower and middle ranks and the trade union bureaucracy) to form a quite sizeable organisation, II Manifesto-PdUP. (it claimed greater numbers than Lotta Continua and AO, but its membership was much less active). But as the CP reasserted its control over the mass movement, the principal leaders of II Manifesto, Lucio Magri and Rosana Rosanda began to rethink the strategy of building a separate party. Lucio Magri formulated a perspective in which the role of the left intellectuals of II Manifesto was to be a 'motor to 25 million Communist legs' — i.e. to exert pressure on the CP pulling it to the left. The labour movement was to be 'recomposed from within, without tearing the fabric'. The logic of Magri's position would be for II Manifesto to rejoin the CP — although other leaders have resisted such a move so far, preferring to pressurise the CP from the outside.
Within two years the effect of the new II Manifesto orientation was to split the PdUP, with the bulk of the trade unionists breaking .iway to the left.
The leaders of Avanguardia Operaia had seen the organisation ilay were building as much more solidly rooted in revolutionary politics and in Leninism than II Manifesto and the PdUP: they had 11 .iihtionally poured scorn on II Manifesto-PdUP as 'centrist'. Yet now they too were pulled to the right. At their 1974 congress they claimed that revolutionaries had to stop being 'minoritorial', and hid lo try to fill the gap created as the CP moved to the right. This meant recognising that the reformist line of the CP had two • contradictions: it was incapable of winning the reforms it wanted • and it was incapable of involving the masses in the struggle for those reforms.. Therefore,.what was necessary was 'the revolutionary fight for reforms;, where the left could gather round it the best miliants involved in the struggle. The revolutionaries had to take ground the CP had prepared, but was now abandoning. And they had to do this both at the level of economic struggles and the struggle for 'democratic demands'.
As abstractly formulated, there seemed nothing wrong with the argument. Revolutionary Marxists have always recognised that certain reforms could only be achieved by the method of revolutionary struggle. But in practice, it soon became clear that some at least of the leaders of AO conceived of the 'revolutionary struggle for reforms' as hardly different from the reformist struggle for reforms.
For the 1976 general elections they produced a joint programme with II Manifesto-PdUP. The central point made in the programme was not the need for workers to maintain their class independence in the struggle for socialism, but to bring to power a 'left' government made up, apparently, of the two reformist parties and the revolutionaries. It actually went so far as to argue that such a government would be "an active instrument in the general process of the transformation of society'. 'Constant mass pressure on the government' could 'make it refuse any role ... in stabilising the capitalist system'. Typically, the pressure on the government would be for things such as 'import controls', 'renegotiation of the common market agricultural system', 'direction of investment' and 'a new international division of labour'.
It can be argued that with such a programme, there was very little reason for workers to vote for the AO-I1 Manifesto-PdUP list rather than the reformists themselves. What was certainly the case was that by fighting on such a programme, the revolutionaries did not even gain, in compensation for their small number of votes, the chance of making large scale, consistent, revolutionary propaganda.
Unfortunately, even the small vote in the elections did not make the leaders of AO think again. The secretary of the party, Campi, rapidly drew conclusions that were no different from those of II Manifesto. The revolutionary left was suffering because it was not sufficiently committed to the 'revolutionary' fight for reforms. It had not broken with a 'sterile intransigence' which cut it off from the wider movement.
Eventually he was resisted by a majority of the AO leaders and left to join with II manifesto. But not before the organisation had been paralysed for months, with a very large number of its members dropping out (according to one estimate, the number of its supporters in Milan fell from about 3000 to about 1000). And the remaining leaders of AO could hardly be said to have been clear themselves. They continued to attempt to put forward a half-reformist programme for dealing with the Italian crisis. They merged with the left, PdUP half of the old PdUP-Il Manifesto. But it was 18 months before the new organisation, Democrazia Proletaria, even got an inaugural congress together.
The third Italian organisation, Lotta Continua, has been more successful than the others in resisting the pull to the right — perhaps because the ultra-left street fighting tradition is most deeply engrained in its cadre. Yet even it veered to the right in 1975-6. In the 1975 elections it refused either to run its own candidates or to tell people to vote for the AO-PdUP-Il Manifesto list. Instead, it told people to vote CP, in order to expose them, under the slogan 'CP to the government'. It veered again before the 1976 elections, putting its own candidates up on the same list as AO-PdUP-Il Manifesto, but with a programme of its own.
It shared the general euphoria in the run-up to the elections — and the same deep, hung over pessimism on the morrow. Indeed, the election results led its general secretary Sofri to produce a political perspective which saw the revolutionary wave on the retreat everywhere, leaving revolutionaries with the only option of very slow, unrewarding work. For Italy, that meant a campaign centred around the single demand of the 35 hour week.
The turn by the Lotta Continua leadership seems to have been greeted with incredulity by much of the membership. 'For the first time people were left without any sense of direction', remarked one female comrade summing up much of the mood of the members at an assembly of the organisation in July 1976 (quoted in Praxis, August-Sept 76 p.8). The resulting disorientation was one of the factors that tore the organisation apart at its Congress three months later.
The veering to the right has not been something confined to Italy. The Swedish organisation Forbundet Kommunist has provided an account of its own lurch in that direction (although it characterises it as a discovery of 'leninism'):
'The strategic debate in Fbrbundct kommunist may be divided into three periods:
"The first period is characterised by a dogmatic Leninist outlook, lacking a strategic perspective. . . The slogans then were to transform the spontaneous struggle to a revolutionary struggle to school a revolutionary cadre. . .
'The second period is strategically characterised by the concentration of independent struggle for a new workers movement outside the traditional workers' organisations. The idea was that outside the traditional trade unions, new democratically controlled tools for working class struggle would develop. Round this a new workers movement would be formed, which would school and strengthen its position through struggle for advanced economic demands. . .
'The third strategic period' involves 'a re-establishment of Leninism, but now in a more developed form, and of the political struggle which was lost during the spontaneous frenzy of the second period. . . The third period politics points out the importance of structural reforms and alliances with reformists as elements in the revolutionary process in a land like Sweden. . . The necessary resistance against the attacks of the bourgeoisie much be linked with an offensive struggle concerned with the direction and the type of production'. (The) 'strategic' (way forward, is to start with putting demands for) 'alternative production' (demands which it is only) 'possible to carry out on an extremely small scale'. (This will prepare the ground for building a) 'new political block of revolutionaries, reformists and environmentalist-political forces' (based on) 'a new development plan for Sweden' (which) 'through anti-capitalist intervention tries to break the dependence on the capitalist world market'. (To build in this direction means an end to raising) 'unrealistic demands'.
In a phrase which could come straight out of some Eurocommunist tract, it is stressed,'we are breaking away from the former high bidding politics of the left and even starting to fight them.' (All quotes from FK. International Bulletin, No.2, 1978)
The conclusions FK draw from this analysis are discussed elsewhere in this journal (see the article by Phil Spencer).
FK's position, ending up proposing measures little different from that of Tony Benn and left social democracy in Britain is important because it carries to its logical conclusion a trend which is apparent in other countries. The FK documents arguing this line themselves refer to an 'international discussion' moving in the same direction from 'the Italian organisation Avanguardia Operaia' and from 'Bent Moos of the Danish organisation Kommunistisk Forbund'. (ibid).
Moving to the right: (2) the would-be Trotskyists
The move of the Swedish FK towards reformism follows from an attempt to bridge the gap that the economic crisis has opened up between the general analysis revolutionaries are able to make of capitalism and our inability to offer an immediate alternative to workers, apart from a list of defensive slogans. The failure is not, however, something that we can overcome of our own volition — since the revolutionary alternative involves precisely the self-activity of workers, not revolutionaries substituting themselves for workers. It is the objective downturn in the level of struggle that robs our slogans of their 'credibility', not the way we voice them (although this can, of course, usually be improved).
In the absence of working class struggle, the attempt by revolutionaries to present 'practical' alternatives means revolutionaries behaving like reformists. In the case of FK, the specific form this has taken has been to give the impression that a government operating within capitalism will mean a mitigation of the effects of the crisis on workers and lead, more or less automatically, to the weakening of the system. Since this government is to be made up of reformists, this has meant the systematic creation of illusions in reformism.
A similar tendency to create these illusions has been apparent in much of the Trotskyist' trend within the European revolutionary movement. As we have seen, in the late sixties and early 1970s, a good part of allegedly 'Trotskyist' politics consisted in undigested chunks of third worldism, student vanguardism and 'movementism'. In practice, this meant a certain proneness to the same street fighting ultra-leftism as the soft Maoists (indeed, some of the Trotskyists' were much worse than the saner soft-Maoist groups).
But there was always another angle to 'Orthodox Trotskyism'. This resisted the ultra-leftism and on occasion the 'studentism', basing itself on the 'Trotskyist tradition".
This was apparent with one wing of the Fourth International and with the Lambertists at the time of the Portuguese revolution in 1974-5. The Lambertists identified openly with the reformist opponents of a radicalisation of the revolution. They lauded the leader of Portuguese social democracy, Mario Soares, as the man who was stopping Portugal moving to East European type totalitarianism (that was exactly the tenor of a series of letters to the British Left Labour paper Tribune by one of the handful of British Lambertists, Mark Jenkins).
They justified this by claiming that the mobilisations of the farmers in the North of Portugal and of the middle class nationally against the leftward shift of the revolution were the main features of a movement of the masses, focussed through the Socialist Party, around the question of democratic freedoms.
The offensive against the left which led to the burning of the offices of revolutionary organisations, of the Communist Party and of trade unions was organised by underground committees with a membership stretching from the right wing of the Socialist Party through to the collaborators of Spinola (see the various revelations that appeared in the bourgeois weekly Expresso in 1976). To the Lambertists it 'had as its main component not organised reaction, but on the contrary was an expression of the extremely deep frustration felt against the Stalinists for their outright support of the bourgois order, whose main guardian is the Armed Forces Movement'. (Marxist Bulletin, Winter 1976 p.8).
This was justified 'theoretically' by making a distinction between the Socialist Party, which was seen as 'a workers party which remains within the framework of bourgeois society and its slate', and the 'fundamentally different' Communist Party, 'which has no precise policy or programme but that of defending on every occasion the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy'. Because of this 11 is not the Socialist Party which in Portugal is waging a bitter si niggle against the masses for the benefit of the restoration of the bourgeoisie. . .' (The French Lambertists paper. La Verite, Sept 75, quoted in ibid).
The position of the American SWP was, in practice, little different. They, and their minute satellite organisation on the ground in Portugal, regarded the great danger at that time as being the alleged threat of 'Bonapartism' from the weak group of left wing officers (the MFA) who managed to dominate Portuguese politics for a little over a year by manoeuvring between the classes and making concession after concession to the workers. So they set their faces against the radical measures being taken by the working class in Lisbon and the South of the country in the name of 'defending democratic rights' against the 'Bonapartists' and the 'Stalinists'! Typically, they raised the slogan 'Up with the constituent assembly' (although it contained a majority of counter-revolutionaries and right wing social democrats) and opposed the takeover by its printers of the paper Republica as 'an attack on freedom of the press'. It is important to stress, that the support for the constituent assembly and the owners of Republica was based on principle, and was not merely advice to workers not to do things that were correct too quickly.
The perverse counter-revolutionary politics of the Lambertists and the nearly as dubious arguments of the American SWP would not perhaps matter, were it not that there are multiple signs that a significant chunk of the leadership of the French LCR (and possibly the Spanish LCR) has been drawn towards their political positions in the last couple of years.
The French LCR displayed signs of a significant shift to the right by the mid-1970s. The narrowness of the victory of Giscard over the Socialist Party candidate, Mitterrand, marked a crucial turning point in French politics. From now on, the formation of a government by the left union (the SP, CP left radical front) became a distinct possibility. Among French workers this was a much more appealing prospect than the formation of a Labour government might be in Britain — the left had not run the government in France for nearly 30 years.
The revolutionary left had no choice but to take account of this, and to say in effect to workers, 'OK, you believe a Left Union government will solve your problems. We don't. But put the Left Union in government and we will see who is correct'.
But the LCR went much further than this. It developed a fantastically mechanical view of what a 'Left Union' government would mean, transcribing into the 1970s what happened in 1936 when the Popular Front government was elected. Within days a huge wave of factory occupations had followed. Now that scenario was just possible in the 1970s — but more likely was a British type scenario, with a Left Union government exploiting the illusions of workers to cool down the struggle and to get away with measures a right wing government never could.
In any case, faced with a reformist government, revolutionaries have the difficult task of carrying though a double strategy: on the one hand to maintain their own complete independence from the government and urging the class to do the same; on the other to fight for demands of a limited character (some of which may even have figured in the left's election programme) alongside workers who have illusions in that government.
This double-edged approach is always difficult to carry out. There will always be pressure on revolutionaries in the workplace to give in to the pressure of the reformist influenced workers around them and to drop their specific criticisms of reformism in the run up to a major election. The task of the party leadership is to aid the members in resisting such pressures.
It cannot be said that the LCR provided such aid. Instead it gave the impression that the mere election of a Left Unity government would open up the ground for revolutionary advance and that revolutionaries should tone down their criticisms of the Left Union.
At one point Alain Krivine, one of the LCR leaders, went so far as to argue that the reformist leaders were frightened to form a government because it would threaten the system. This was after the left had done quite well in the 1976 local elections. He wrote, 'In such a situation, the workers are right to say to the CP and the SP we've given you a majority, use it. It's possible to throw out this minority regime by basing yourselves on our struggles. CP, SP, take your responsibilities'. (Rouge 17.3.76)
A few months later, he went on to suggest that if a Left Union government were elected, revolutionaries would have to keep quiet about their criticisms of it when it came to mass work. 'For a longer or shorter period . . . there would be a period of enthusiasm, of real mobilisation of the working class with enormous illusions. . . The essential axis of revolutionaries will not immediately be the battle to overthrow the left government. That wouldn't be understood by workers who hadn't gone through the reformist experience. . .' (quoted in Revolution, 2.7.76)
Perhaps more dangerous than the possibility of the members dropping their criticisms of the Left Union after a successful election for the left, was the resultant stress on elections and electoral manoeuvring as the way forward for the class. The impression was created that there was nothing militants could do until the Left Union was in power.
But then, shortly before the elections were due to take place in the Spring of 1978, the Left Union fell apart. For its own opportunist reasons (because the Union was strengthening the SP until it had more support than the CP) the leadership of the French CP suddenly took a 'left' turn and demanded a harder programme from its Socialist allies. The SP rejected this, and the two parties entered the first round of the election at odds with each other. A central part of the argument of the SP leadership was that the CP had exposed themselves as 'splitters'.
The revolutionary left could not, of course, keep quiet at such a juncture. There was a very simple argument for them to put across: both the CP and the SP leaders had been telling workers for years not to 'rock the boat' before elections by undue militancy — and now the people who had said this were 'rocking the boat' themselves. This proved how wrong the 'unity at any price' argument had been all along.
This was not, however, the argument of the LCR. Instead, they proclaimed the day after the election defeat in words that must have seemed like SP propaganda to many CP members, 'The price of disunity'. In the period since, their main slogan has been for the 'Front Unique Ouvriere' — not meaning by this a united front of revolutionaries and reformists around particular, partial demands that the reformist leaders claim to support, but abstract unity at the top between the CP and the SP. Again, since it was the CP who disrupted the previous unity, the slogan excuses the SP leadership who want just enough 'unity' to hoist themselves into electoral office.
In practice, the LCR slogan tends to support the reformist SP leadership in its quarrels with the reformist CP leadership, even though the organised core of the French working class still see the CP and its union, the CGT, as 'more militant' than the SP. The line of support for the SP has long been the position of the Lambertists. It is therefore not surprising that within the LCR a sizeable chunk of the leadership have come to the logical conclusion that they should move towards unity of their organisation and that of the OCI.
The turn to the right within the European section of the USFI has not been confined to France. In Britain, the IMG which had predicted dual power in 1974 was advising its members to enter the Labour party in 1975. Since then, the emphasis has shifted to open work through electioneering and to work within the Broad Lefts in trade unions. The rightward drift is shown by the slogan raised by a spokesman of the IMG in a special issue of their paper concerned with the reaction of the left to the rejection of the government's five per cent wage norm by key groups of workers: 'Recall the Labour Party conference', wrote Brian Grogan.
One indication of the overall rightward shift in the European sections of the USFI is the way in which their long row with the American section, the American SWP, has been liquidated. Where there used to be rival USFI sections in particular countries they have been merged — and on terms which give the 'pro-American SWP' elements more than a fair share of influence. A second indication is the way that in theory some of the old positions defended by the American SWP have been implicitly accepted by the other leaders of the international'. During the revolutionary period in Portugal, in 1974-5, the 'European USFI' group in Portugal, the LCI, raised demands not all that different from the rest of the extreme left. It supported the Republica workers, and it initiated the negotiations that led to the setting up of the joint revolutionary-centrist-CP front, the FUR. (see issues of Imprecor for the Summer of 1975).
Today, however, the leaders of the USFI condemn such decisions. They see the action of the Republica workers in challenging the right socialist chief shareholder of that paper, Paul Rego, as the action that led to the defeat of the revolution. 'The Portuguese revolution', Ernest Mandel has written, 'was blown off course' over the question of 'freedom of the press' (NLR 100 p. 110). Such has ben the shift to the right in the revolutionary, "European", sections of the Fourth International that they are now parrotting phrases that only used to come from the decidedly non-revolutionary American section — which goes part of the way to explain why some of them hankerfor unity with the Lambertists, for whom the American SWP has long felt a certain affection.
As with the soft Maoists, a formerly ultra left stance has wilted when faced with the stark reality of a temporary downturn in the level of struggle. Again, as with soft Maoists, the characteristic expression of this has been a softening of the attitude towards reformist organisations, even to the extent of pretending that in the guise of 'left governments' (for the soft Maoists) or 'workers governments' (for the alleged Trotskyists) they can 'open up the way' for revolutionary transformation. Finally, in the case of some of the soft Maoists and virtually all of the 'Trotskyists' 'intermediate' or 'transitional demands' are raised in the abstract, without seeing how they relate in the here and now to the only agency that can carry through a revolutionary transformation of society — the working class. Whether in the name of 'Marxist-Leninist tactics' or in the name of 'the transitional programme of the Fourth International' the central element in Marxism is forgotten for the sake of short term manoeuvring.
Moving to the margins
A downturn in the level of generalised class struggle does not mean that all struggles die away. A whole range of particular struggles can flare up and become very bitter indeed while the big battalions of the working class remain quiescent. So in Britain, in the doldrum years of 1975-6 we saw a very militant reaction against racist attacks within the Asian community, a very important strike for equal pay by the Trico workers, we saw sections of workers who had never taken action before get involved in one day strikes and demonstrations against the public sector cuts, and we saw the biggest wave of student occupations for several years. More recently during the lull after the defeat of the firemen's strike in 1978, we saw the Anti Nazi League draw into demonstrations the biggest numbers seen in Britain since the demonstrations against the Conservatives' Industrial Relations Bill in the early seventies.
In Italy there was a similar phenomenon in 1977 — the year after the Communist Party first threw its weight behind the Andreotti Christian Democrat government and successfully de-escalated the industrial struggle. A huge wave of student struggles blew up in Bologna and Rome, and drew into bigger conflicts with the police and the CP tens of thousands of students and unemployed ex-students throughout the country.
In Spain during the period in which the pact of Moncloa was holding down the industrial struggle, there seems to have been a flourishing of all sorts of movements for national and regional autonomy, outside the traditional centres of national opposition to the Spanish state in Euskadi (the Basque country) and Catalonia. It was during this period, for instance, that a vicious police attack on an autonomist demonstration in Malaga led to a general strike throughout Southern Spain.
Revolutionaries cannot ignore such movements. Their conflicts with the existing state power can bring whole new layers of people to see the need for socialist revolution. If revolutionaries know how to intervene in them, they can refurbish their ranks and maintain the feeling of struggle within their own organisations at a time when the low level of the class struggle encourages some comrades to drop out and others to adopt timid, conservative attitudes.
However, there is always a danger when an organisation works in relationship to such protest movements (just as there is always a danger of drowning when you go swimming — although that is not of course a reason for not taking part in the activity). It is that the members come to think that revolutionary political activity consists in demonstrations against the police, or simply taking part in these movements, and not in fighting to link them with the much more difficult struggle for workers' power.
A great deal of tactical flexibility is needed, since such movements tend to flare up very quickly, can become very intense and very militant for a brief moment — and then die away just as quickly. A revolutionary organisation has to be prepared to work in them unreservedly, to argue for a policy of militant confrontation with the powers that be against those who see the movement as achieving its goals in reformist terms — but at the same time to recognise that the movement may well be fairly short lived and that only those of its members who come to see the need for class politics will survive.
If a revolutionary organisation cannot combine such tactical flexibility with a principled defence of class politics, then far from these movements contributing to the building of the revolutionary forces in society, they can dissipate and weaken the revolutionaries themselves.
The Italian case shows very clearly what such disorientation means. All three major revolutionary organisations were moving to the right in 1976. This led them to distance themselves from their own members who got caught up in the 'movements' that began to build up outside the mainstream of the working class. They lost many of their best and most active rank and file members; and within the 'movements' a whole ideology developed of 'autonomism' — they had to keep out politics, because politics meant the right wing behaviour of the leaders of the revolutionary organisations.
The destructive dialectic at work showed itself first in Lotta Continua. LC was the most left wing of the revolutionary organisations in 1976, and the one that turned its back least on the 'movements'. But it had also tried to cast itself in a Marxist-Leninist (i.e. Maoist) mould. In December 1975 this still meant the party as the repository of Mao's thought laying down the line to the masses. The women's movement organised a large demonstration against the reactionary abortion laws. It was on a women only basis - and so Lotta Continua's all male servizio d'ordine (stewards) broke into the demonstration on the grounds that abortion was an issue for both men and women. The result was a departure of large numbers of women from Lotta Continua in disgust.
The women who remained inside the organisation began to feel that there was some connection between the leadership style of the organisation and what had happened. But few saw the connection in the whole tradition of Stalinist politics which Maoism had passed on to the revolutionary left. Most saw at fault the whole notion of a revolutionary organisation trying to work out a consistent line that linked particular movements into the overall struggle for workers' power. At the 1977 Lotta Continua Congress, the organisation's leadership came to adopt very much the same standpoint. They abandoned the attempt to try to create an organisation that would argue its politics within the different movements, and instead began to define politics as the sum-total of all the different movements. In the months that followed Lotta Continua dissolved itself as an organisation in an effort to become the movement.
This self-dissolution did not — and could not — solve the problems facing the revolutionary left. The 'movements' that flourished so much in 1977 died down as rapidly as they had grown — and in the process underwent intense political polarisation.
The 'autonomy' of the student/unemployed ex-student movement did not stop the development within it of bitter divisions between the supporters of immediate all-out armed action against the state, and those who had a saner view. (For an account of this period which is excellent despite — or perhaps because of — the authors' sympathy with the 'autonomy' argument, see Italy 1977-8). The 'autonomy' of the women's movement did not alter the fact that despite its power in 1976-7, it was a coming together of women from different social classes, motivated above all by the fight for the right to abortion, which could not hang together for long once that battle was sold out by the CP and an extremely reactionary 'liberal' abortion law was on the statute book.
Lotta Continua's burying of itself in the 'movements' in 1977 had the same effect as its disdain for a movement it could not dominate with its Mao derived theories in 1975. There was no consistent force at work within the movements, drawing the best elements in them to a revolutionary socialist world view and to the organisational consequences of that (i.e. the need to build a party rooted in the workplaces). Instead, Lotta Continua's own theories came to see virtually any 'autonomous' protest movement as 'the proletariat', however indifferent to it the vast mass of CP-voting Italian workers actually were. 'If the historians of the future have time to spare, they will be able to collect hundreds of articles from Lotta Continua in which any students disposed to go into the street with slogans are referred to as proletarians' (P. Petti in Praxis, Feb 1979, p.25).
Yet, at least Lotta Continua did relate to the movements of 1977. The other organisations of the revolutionary left hardly seem to have done so at all. Their own concern in 1976 to distance themselves from 'extremism' hardly left them any ability to offer leadership to the new groups thrown into struggle a year later. They remained paralysed, torn by internal crises, while their rank and file militants either dropped out of action, or tamely lagged behind demonstrations of the 'autonomisti'.
Yet it cannot be said that the movement of 1977 had no effect on Democrazia Proletaria (the new organisation built by the merger of the majority of AO and the PdUP). The confidence of its leadership was shaken, so much so that when the first conference of the new organisation took place in 1978 it refused to set out any precise organisational structures.
This was deliberate. It was, claimed a congress document, meant to discourage 'any individualistic posing, any leaderism'. (quoted in Praxis, May 1978 p.5). There were no formal votes on strategy or tactics; this was 'a moment in the process of re-aggregation' of the revolutionary left rather than a formal conference. But such formulations could not hide the fact that a general discussion involving 2000 comrades could not begin to resolve the problems facing the Italian revolutionary left. 'When questioned about this, the organisers admitted that the left in general and DP in particular were in no condition to take and abide by decisions passed by a majority and that until some consensus was achieved within the organisation over the very basis of their politics, a formal conference would not have been very useful' (Tim Potter, in SWP International Discussion Bulletin no.7/8 p.28). The congress did repudiate the old 'left government' line. However, other analyses of the congress showed that this confusion had been replaced by other confusions, imported into DP from the 'autonomous' movements it had failed to relate to in 1977. It set its task as not being to prioritise work inside the working class, but to 'accumulate forces practising a broad democratic opposition, based on the radicality of the workers and the new movements and thus capable of unifying the anti-capitalist bloc' (quoted in Praxis, op. cit.).
Again, as with Lotta Continua, the old notions of the party which had contained large doses of Maoist-Stalinism were being abandoned. But what had replaced it was not a genuinely Marxist notion of the party, in which militants get together in a disciplined way to discuss what they are doing and to elect a leadership but a near-rejection of any notion of a structured organisation at all.
This approach abandons any attempt either to draw the different movements together into a common struggle, or to relate them to the only force that can win their particular demands — the passive, yet potentially revolutionary industrial working class. For, the movements are movements on the margins of society: this even applies to the women's movement (though women are the majority of the population) — it is a movement that only involves a very thin layer of working class women and is viewed with bemusement (sometimes sympathetic, sometimes hostile) by the vast mass of those it claims to represent. The notion of 'autonomy', not simply of respecting the right of those involved in the movements to make their own decisions (as if there were any choice about that), but of refusing in principle to attempt to intervene in the debates within the movements to influence the decisions taken, precludes any attempt to help the movements break out from the 'margins'.
The point can be reached where the notions of separate 'autonomous' sectors infects the revolutionary organisation itself. It drops any attempt to build a politically homogeneous organisation through debate and democratic decision making, and becomes simply a federation of different interest groups, a 'bloc' of 'youth' and the 'old', the 'trade unionists' and 'the women', 'the northerners' and 'the southerners' all taking their separate decisions: a bit like a more left wing version of the Eurocommunist British CP in which any notion of party discipline has disappeared, allowing, for instance, middle rank trade union bureaucrats to continue to behave as if the working class was exclusively male, while the radicalised women members of the same party experiment with alternative life styles.
Once you have such a situation, the revolutionary press ceases to be a real unifier of the different struggles against the system: instead it becomes a series of different sections: this one for the women, this one for the youth, this one for the 40 year old virtually full time member of the factory council, this one for the different members of the 'movement' to debate ad nauseam with one another — the only thing missing is any overall political analysis capable of reaching out beyond the 'movement' and explaining to working class activists still under reformist influence why they should struggle alongside the revolutionary left.
The picture I have just painted is an exaggerated one. But it does point to a danger facing the revolutionary organisations. In an over zealous attempt to ingratiate itself with the 'movements' (an over-reaction due to its failure to take any real account of them at an earlier stage) the organisation ceases to have anything to say which will attract their supporters away from their 'autonomous' depoliticised beliefs, and at the same time ceases also to be a force attempting to articulate the correct points in their stance to an audience inside the industrial working class.
The first time as tragedy, the second as farce: that just about sums up the way in which the Italian experience of the flight to the margins has been repeated, on a smaller scale, in other countries. In Italy there was, at least, a huge movement by the 'marginali' in 1977; there was something tangible for those recoiling at the Maoist notion of the party and leadership to throw themselves into.
In France, however, the situation was different. The Bordeaux organisation of Lutte Ouvriere which split away a few years back drifted off in something like the same direction; and much of the opposition to the pro-Lambertist trend inside the LCR is motivated by a reaction against the notion of a democratic centralist party. Yet this has been 'autonomism' without mass 'autonomous' struggles: a sure recipe for revolutionaries trying to resolve their own 'crisis of militancy' by what is little more than life style politics (sometimes dresed up as 'bridging the gap between the personal and the political').
In effect, this is a recipe for the disintegration of the revolutionary left. It means turning away from the struggle to win workers, and instead pursuing purity within existing society. Paradoxically, the end point for those who started off counterposing the 'revolutionary self-activity' of the 'autonomous' movement to the 'rigidity' of the revolutionary organisation is reformism: for the 'self-activity' is the activity of a minority trapped within the structures of capitalist society who rejoice in the ghetto in which they find themselves; without the influence of revolutionaries prepared to criticise their 'self-activity' and to point the way out of the ghetto, they will end up trying to negotiate the best terms available with the powers that be.
Sectarianism
'The development of the system of socialist sects and of the real workers movement always stand in inverse ratio to one another'. What Marx wrote to Bolte in 1871 still rings true today. Inevitably, one by-product of the down turn in the level of generalised working class struggle after the mid-1970s was a certain turn towards sectarianism. By this is meant not an insistence on revolutionary organisations arguing out their politics: this is always necessary and those who deplore it end up by merely excusing sloppy theory and practice. Real sectarianism consists in 'instead of looking among the genuine elements of the class movement for the real basis for agitation', attempting 'to prescribe their course to these elements according to a certain dogmatic recipe. . . The sect sees the justification for its existence and its "point of honour" — not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it.' (Marx to Schweitzer, 13 Oct 1868 — Marx's emphases).
Dropping into 'life style' or 'movementist' politics is one form
of sectarianiam: would be revolutionaries stop trying to relate to the
movements of the class, however small, and instead put the emphsis
on shielding their own lives or groupings from the 'backwardness' of
the class. But the sectarianism can be just as marked with those who
stick to old revolutionary organisations. They too try to insulate
themselves from the outside world. The sect preserves its identity — without putting its members to the test of any real struggle against the forces pulling the movement to the right.
No doubt, it is this which explains the attraction of the rightist sect the OCI to a good half of those inside the LCR who are still committed to party building. It may explain the way in which the Stalinist sect, the MLS has succeeded in maintaining itself, while the three larger Italian organisations have plunged into crisis. It certainly explains the success of the Trotskyist' Militant group in Britain in maintaining itself, and even growing a little, buried deep inside the Labour Party and as the right wing of the Broad Left in a couple of unions. Finally, it provides an explanation of the relative endurance of the very small sects (the small Trotskyist sects in Britain, the Bordigists in Italy): those who have never tried to storm heaven do not resent being earth-bound.
The Way out of the crisis
The European revolutionary left is in crisis. But it is certainly not dead. If it were there would have been no point in writing this article! I have located one element leading to crisis in the objective siuation we have all faced since the mid-1970s. But I have also insisted there is another element — the political stances which most of the European organisations embraced in their period of growth, 1968-74. It was a politics which, whether in its sub-Maoist or sub-Trotskyist form, was unable to cope when the easy 'truths' of those years fell apart.
To get out of the crisis (or at least to ensure that the temporary recovery noticeable in some places now is not lost the moment there is another sharp shift in the struggle) requires a theoretical, political and organisational reformation of the revolutionary left.
Theoretical One of the worst failings of the revolutionary left internationally has been a failure to use Marxism to understand the dynamic of the modern world. Certain things have been hallowed to such an extent that they never receive critical evaluation by most of the revolutionary left (that there are 'progressive' countries, that the 'working class' played a leadership role in the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, even that it is justified to talk of Eastern Europe as 'socialist', that the Cultural Revolution was intended by Mao as a real revolution, that there is 'unequal exchange' between the 'third world' and the advanced countries). 'Theory' has been left with the task of either purely academic studies or of simply interrogating oneself (exemplified in the case of Althusser where Theory, with a capital T, is not about the real world at all, but about its own status).
In Britain, this has been summed up over the years in a division of labour,whereas for much of the non-SWP left New Left Review has supplied the 'theory'; reformism, soft Guevarism, soft Maoism or soft Mandelism has supplied the 'practice'! In the Latin countries, a range of non-revolutionary thinkers like Poulantzas, Althusser, Rosana Rosanda, Samur Amin have supplied the 'theory', and the revolutionaries have then pragmatically inserted 'practice' into it.
The revolutionary left cannot afford such luxuries today. It desperately needs explanations of the invasion of Cambodia, the war between China and Vietnam, of the ever more apparent denial of elementary rights to workers in Russia; it needs a scientific appraisal of the host of 'progressive' regimes in the 'third world' that sing revolutionary hymns while torturing their own working class; it needs an analysis of the dynamic of the world economy, which goes beyond glib references to the diplomatic manoeuvring of the great powers (witness the current tendency of the soft Maoists to explain everything in terms of German imperialism) and begins to explain the economic forces which hold the rival ruling classes in their grip; finally, it needs an analysis of the working class itself, of its changing composition (the growth of allegedly non-productive white collar and service sectors, the influx of married women into the workforce, the effects of this on the working class family) and above all of the role of the reformist bureaucracy that now penetrates, partially at least, into every factory.
The soft Maoist and 'orthodox' Trotskyist organisations have failed to analyse any of these questions seriously: the journalism of Isaac Deutscher and then of Ernest Mandel is the closest most of them have come to admitting them as problems. Yet today, some answers at least to these sorts of questions are a precondition for consistent work from the revolutionary cadre.
We in the International Socialists and then the SWP have at least sketched out possible answers to some of the questions, with the theories we developed of state capitalism, the permanent arms economy, deflected revolution and 'the shifting locus of reformism' (for outline accounts of these see Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, Chris Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, Nigel Harris, The Mandate of Heaven: Marx and Mao in Modern China; Mike Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War; the various articles in International Socialism 1:61). Our answers are open to debate and certainly need updating (see the discussion in Intenational Socialism 1:100 and, of course, in the new series of IS). But the answers we have, however inadequate, have provided us with some guidelines through the turmoil of the last few years. They have enabled us to retain a confidence in a political judgement, to grasp some of the aspects of the dynamic of the system on a world scale, and to reach back to the revolutionary traditions without falling into the sectarianism or those who cross themselves before the shrine of Hunan of the tablets of 1938.
There are signs today that others are beginning to take such questioning seriously; certainly without the revival of a current of creative Marxism linked to revolutionary practice, there can be no seious escape from the impasse of the international revolutionary left.
Political Politics is the point of interaction of theory and practice. The absence of serious theory within the revolutionary left (or, what amounts to the same thing, a theory culled from Maoism, Populism, Third Worldism and, on occasions, an extremely mechanical interpretaion of certain things written by Trotsky in the 1930s) has been accompanied by a tendency to look for political substitutes for working class action when the class is in retreat — whether the substitute lies in a softness towards the left' within the trade union bureaucracy, in certain 'third world' figures, or in the 'marginal' movements. All this is justified in terms of a rejection of 'economism'.
In a downturn in the class struggle, it is the duty of revolutionary organisations to relate to all sorts of movements that develop outside the workplaces among oppressed and exploited groups. But, it has to do this while never forgetting that the agent of revolutionary change lies elsewhere. 'Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must they be smashed'. And the link with the working class movement has to be an active one, not merely a rhetorical one. The revolutionary organisation has to search out and connect with the smallest spark of working class resistence against the system, even in a period in which its own growth comes mainly from the 'marginal' areas. Otherwise it will not be able to relate to the agent of revolutionary change when it begins to stir.
In Italy, for instance, the CP has defined the workers in the big enterprises as 'its own' and the unemployed, the semi-employed and the students as 'marginal'. Sections of the revolutionary left have merely reversed the terms, seeing the large enterprises has havens of 'reformism' and 'economism', and the 'marginali' as 'the proletariat'.
You cannot, however, talk about relating to workers in the large enterprises without coming to terms with another question all too often evaded: the role of the reformist trade union bureaucracy in relation to reformist workers. There is a tendency for revolutionaries to see this merely in terms of a bureaucracy with reformist politics facing workers with revolutionary politics. In the ultra-left phase, the revolutionary instincts of the whole proletariat are always seen as about to break through the thin reformist crust; in the period of the drift to the right, a more complex, but still mistaken notion is accepted — that there is a battle of 'tendencies' within the trade union movement, with left officials and workers fighting right officials. What is not allowed for is the way in which the hierarchical structure of the trade unions themselves draw officials away from contact with the shop floor, aligning reformist officials with management against reformist workers — and aligning 'revolutionary' officials with reformist officials against workers.
It is this which allows the possibility, even in a downturn, of revolutionary workers etc. drawing reformist workers alongside them in struggle against the reformist bureaucracy. It is this which allows in an upturn the creation of rank and file groups in which revolutionary and reformist workers work together — and it is this too which means that at all points revolutionaries have to be wary of those from their ranks who become full time officials and insist that it is the rank and file party members, not just the officials, who determine the party's trade union policy.
Without some such conception of building 'rank and file groups' — however low key and however informal — around each revolutionary in a factory, trade union strategy alternates between attempts by small groups of revolutionaries to counterpose themselves to the unions as the representatives of the workers, and revolutionaries attempting to manoeuvre as part of the trade union apparatus, relying upon the 'left' in the trade union machine rather than on the movements, however limited, of the class itself.
Organisation There is often a tendency of people to counterpose politics and organisation ('it's a political, not an organisational question'); but revolutionary politics finds its embodiment in revolutionary organisation.
The international revolutionary left is still oscillating between two erroneous organisational principles: that of diluted Stalinism (sometimes called 'Marxism-Leninism'; sometimes called 'Trotskyism', but in fact going back to Zinoviev's 'Bolshevisation' of the Comintern) and that of a semi-anarchist 'anything goes' attitude (usually dressed up with talk of the need for 'autonomous' movements or for 'new forms of organisation').
The diluted Stalinist organisation is one in which the leadership (often in the form of a 'super-star' general secretary) hands down 'the line', in which the Internal Bulletin is the explanation of the leadership's latest move, and the congresses are rallies, with occasional dissident voices subordinated to the general aim of creating a favourable public image.
The 'anything goes' form of organisation is that marked by no apparent national line, by endless debates which get nowhere, and by a structure which leaves effective control in the hands of whoever happens at a particular point to have got control of the printing press or the central office. The movement' rules, without structures, without elections, without ordered agenda — and with th best placed or the most vociferous getting their way.
In the IS and the SWP we have attempted, over the years, to develop a quite different model to either of these two — a model which we think bears some similarity to the Bolshevik party before the isolation and degeneration of the Russian revolution. It is a model that recognises that a leadership is needed — the class war is after all a war, and in a war an army has to be led. But it also recognises that the personnel, and the strategies and the tactics of the leadership should not be sacrosanct, but should be open to discussion by the membership, especially after key developments in the struggle and before conferences. Only thus can the leadership be forced to maintain contact with the lived experience of struggle.
The practice of building organisations along these lines is much more difficult than the theory: in the case of the SWP we have had bitter experience of sectarian groupings exploiting the democratic structure and ruining untold branches in order to try to win members for themselves; we have also discovered the hard way that a free exchange of opinions and a free formation of platforms before conferences must be prevented by the self-discipline of all those involved from degenerating into ritualistic jousting between a 'leadership' and an 'oposition' that is reminiscent of bourgeois parliaments, (for a rather warped account of this see Martin Shaw in Socialist Register 1978; for a reply from the SWP see Duncan Hallas in Socialist Review Feb 1979.) Nevertheless, we remain convinced that only the building of organisations on these lines can prevent a continual splintering of the revolutionary vanguard between those with great revolutionary zeal but little experience, and those with great experience, but diminished zeal.
Finally, the question of organisation cannot be separated from the question of the paper. A regular revolutionary paper is essential to bind the different components of the party together. And it must not be — as so many papers produced by the revolutionary left internationally have been (examples, Rouge, Quotidiano, di Lavoratori, II Manifesto, the Red Mole) — directed at 'the movement' or the radicalised intelligentsia. It has to be a paper for the section of the working class that shows some movement, carrying news of the 'movement' certainly, but in a way that relates to worker activists. Only then can it bind the cadres to the class as well as to each other.
Revolutionary patience Neither the theoretical, political or organisational remedies we have offered would give a massive new lease of life to the revolutionary left by themselves. They are not going to get us out of the vicious circle in which workers say to us 'What is your alternative', we reply 'your class is the alternative' and they say, 'But our class doesn't care'.
The only way out of such situations is to wait for the class itself to move. That is what previous generations of revolutionaries have had to do: it is what Marx had to do after the defeat of the 1848 revolution; it is what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to do after the defeat of the 1905 revolution; it is what Rosa Luxemburg had to do in the bitter period between the outbreak of World War 1 and the first stirrings of the German revolutionary movement nearly three years later. That the class will move is not in doubt: whether it likes it or not it is the most powerful social force in a system incapable of moving in any direction without stumbling; in order to preserve the very things given it by the system in the past, the working class will again and again be forced to struggle, even if again and again it allows the struggle to die down through lack of confidence in itself as the alternative to the system.
Revolutionary patience is the order of the day. It is the only alternative to either allegedly 'transitional' but in reality reformist palliatives that suggest that something other then the self emancipation of the class can deal with the crisis of the system, or to running off in pursuit of ephemeral 'new movements'. But revolutionary patience must not be confused with sectarian passivity. It means seizing every opportunity to intervene in struggle, using those opportunities to test the organisation, to draw to it the best new activists, to build its reputations within the class, and to slowly move towards the necessary party.
29 October 2009
The Storm Breaks: The crisis in the eastern bloc , 1990
>THE STORM BREAKS
This piece was written in the winter of 1989-90, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was an attempt to see what had happened not as a failure of socialism, but as a crisis of a particular form of capitalism, state capitalism, which could not be resolved by reforms that placed greater reliance on market mechanisms. Readers can judge how accurate its anslyses were. (Apologies for not having time to reinsert footnote numbers in text)
This piece was written in the winter of 1989-90, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was an attempt to see what had happened not as a failure of socialism, but as a crisis of a particular form of capitalism, state capitalism, which could not be resolved by reforms that placed greater reliance on market mechanisms. Readers can judge how accurate its anslyses were. (Apologies for not having time to reinsert footnote numbers in text)
Not since 1917-18, when three great empires collapsed under the burden of four years of total war, have we witnessed such political turmoil as that east of the
Such events have challenged almost all established political analyses whether in the East or in the West. Cold War strategists, ideologues of confrontation with 'totalitarianism', long time Western worshippers of the 'socialist third of the world' and newer adulators of 'Gorby' have all had to face up to the sudden disappearance of their fixed points of reference.
The situation has been confusing for the Western right: they suddenly have to justify missiles in
The 'openness' spread from the media to cultural life. Banned novels began to appear in print and banned paintings to replace the monstrosities of socialist realism in the art galleries. Rock groups whose songs expressed undirected but bitter anger at the system were invited by sections of the official youth organisation, the Komsomol, to appear ai concerts. Economists cut through 60 years of lies about economic performance and historians began to reveal, slowly at first, truths about the Stalin period. A film about the
The response of virtually everyone who wrote on the
Unqualified support for Gorbachev was also widespread among those critical of the old system inside the
There were very few people who were prepared to argue at that time, as we did in this journal, that the left should not put their faith in Gorbachev. Yet disillusionment was not so long in coming. Gorbachev rarely criticised those who 'obstructed' perestroika and glasnost without also attacking those who sought to push them 'too quickly'. As early as the autumn of 1987 he disowned Boris Yeltsin, then head of the Moscow Party organisation, for trying to go too fast and replaced him by a more conservative figure, Zaikov. A keynote speech on the anniversary of the 1917 revolution was expected to push for more rapid changes but instead carefully balanced between those who wanted faster movement and those who wanted less. It was only when, five months later, politburo members resistant to any glasnost arranged for the paper Sovietskaya Rossiya to print an article claiming things had gone too far that Gorbachev opted for more glasnost in the run up to a special party conference in June 1988. Critical intellectuals seized the opportunity to ask questions about Soviet society and Soviet history that had not been asked before. The first open and legal demonstrations for 60 years took place in many localities, demanding that delegates to the party conference were supporters of perestroika, glasnost and Gorbachev.
Yet at the conference Gorbachev sided with the best known conservative figure, Ligachev, in response to criticism from Yeltsin. When Mikhail Ulanov, head of the newly formed theatre workers' union, complained that outside
Gorbachev's own proposals for 'free elections' to a new Congress of Deputies reserved a third of the positions for nominees of official (ie party controlled) organisations and provided a filtering procedure of constituency delegate meetings to weed out undesirable candidates. In the months that followed he signed a decree allowing the police to arrest those involved in 'unauthorised' demonstrations and made no objection as local apparatchiks did their utmost to get their candidates through the constituency meetings.
At the first session of the Congress deputies could, and did, complain about virtually anything—the privileges of the party bureaucracy, the terrible shortages of consumer goods, the vast pockets of poverty in the country, the horrific legacy of Stalin, the behaviour of the KGB, the use of special troops in Georgia, the mistreatment of national minorities, the decrees restricting the right to demonstrate and to criticise the government, even the decisions of Gorbachev himself.
But the whole proceedings were carefully arranged to stop such complaints being channelled into any democratic decision making. A meeting of the ruling party's central committee before the congress had decreed that 70 percent of the deputies who were party members should vote for Gorbachev to be elected unopposed as president. Gorbachev then insisted that he alone had the right to choose his vice-president and to nominate people for other key government posts. The electoral lists for the smaller full-time parliament, the Supreme Soviet, were drawn up in such a way as to deny any choice at all for many of the candidates.
When contentious issues arose at the Congress they were referred to commissions which had to report to the Supreme Soviet, rather than being voted on by the Congress. This is what happened over the Georgian massacre, the sacking of two state prosecutors who had alleged corruption at the very top of the party, and the question of the validity of the Stalin-Hitler pact which incorporated the Baltic republics into the
Chairing sessions, or sitting close behind the chair and interrupting the proceedings whenever he wanted, Gorbachev allowed the radical deputies to speak, but then pushed through decisions which received hearty support from the conservative majority. Gorbachev himself showed no concern when Sakharov was shouted down for a speech denouncing atrocities by Soviet troops in
Those radicals who had been most favourable to Gorbachev a year before were bitter in their attacks on him. Yuri Afanasyev, the historian, complained at the Congress itself:
“We have formed a Stalin-Brezhnev type of Supreme Soviet... the majority which has taken shape.. .at this congress yesterday blocked all the decisions of the congress that the people are expecting from us... and you Mikhail Sergeyevich [Gorbachev] are either listening attentively to this majority or else cleverly influencing it. . .let us not for a moment forget about who sent us here, to this congress.'"
Outside the Congress hall radical attitudes were even more bitter. Opinion polls showed a very large proportion of people as disappointed with the Congress, and there were almost daily meetings at the Luzhniki stadium. One report on Lithuanian radio:
“The number of participants was estimated by one speaker at 150,000—150,000 standing on a huge asphalted triangle. . . The meeting was organised by the Manorial Society and the Moscow Popular Front. . . The mere mention of Boris Yeltsin 's name sent the crowd howling and screaming. The presence of academician Sakharov electrified the crowd. . .I7
Vitaly Ponamarov of the Moscow Popular Front drew enormous applause at one rally when he declared, 'We have no confidence in Gorbachev. Gorbachev has lost his authority with the people."
The disillusionment among the radical intelligentsia was very deep indeed by the end of the year as they witnessed Gorbachev trying to sack the editor of the country's fastest growing newspaper, Argumenty i fakty, and turning off the microphones in the middle of a speech by Sakharov at the second session of the Congress of Delegates. Sakharov's last political action before he died was to issue a call for a strike in protest at limits to democratisation. The February 1990 Central Committee decision to concede the existence of other parties was much acclaimed in the Western media; it could not stop the disillusionment inside the
The
It was not only among the radical intelligentsia that discontent grew with Gorbachev. There was a growing mood of disillusionment among the mass of the people. This was already clear in the spring 1989 elections, when Yeltsin thrashed the official party nominee in
‘The majority of Soviet families appear not to have sensed a change for the better... The supply of goods to the consumer market 'suddenly' began to deteriorate sharply and noticeably before our eyes in the second half of 1987 and especially in 1988.'
At a meeting of the ruling party's central committee in the early summer speaker after speaker went to the platform to warn of growing popular resentment. Bobovikov, the party chief from
The central committee meeting took place just as a wave of strikes was sweeping the country's coal mines, from
In a desperate attempt to try to regain control of the situation Ryzhkov announced a series of emergency measures to the Congress of Deputies in December—measures which effectively jettisoned the move away from a centralised command economy which was supposed to be the centre of perestroika.'' Yeltsin was able to give expression to widespread popular scepticism when he told the Congress:
‘The people is losing its trust while we are constantly repeating that perestroika has embraced everyone, that it is getting deeper and wider. . . This is already the fifth attempt to reform the country's economy in three decades. Remember the reforms of 1956, 1966, 1979 and 1983. What did they lead to? Our fifth attempt has been getting nowhere for five years now.’
The
There was a final factor underlying the growing disillusionment with Gorbachev: his inability to deal with mass discontent, which grew as the economic crisis worsened.
The miners' strikes of the summer and autumn of 1989 were one expression of this discontent. But through most of 1988 and 1989 direct expressions of class struggle were overshadowed by an eruption of nationalism among the non-Russian ethnic groups which make up half the
Against the background of national strife, which has not spared even the world's most advanced countries, the
Those on the left internationally who lauded Gorbachev at the time could be just as short sighted." Yet the seeds of national discontent had long been present and were visible to those prepared, ideologically, to look for them.''
The general blindness to the national question persisted even after troops were sent to Alma Ata late in 1986 to deal with nationalist protests over the sacking of the local Kazakh party leader, Kunaev, and his replacement by a Russian, Kolbin. Commentators East and West accepted official claims that the demonstrators were high on drugs supplied by supporters of the dismissed leader.
Then in February 1988 the capital of
The first demonstrators carried pictures of Gorbachev and chanted slogans such as 'Karabakh is the test of perestroika . Gorbachev spoke for an hour and a half on Armenian television, politburo members rushed to
Meanwhile, there was a sudden—and unexplained—outbreak of communal rioting in the
A pattern was set which was to be repeated again and again. In March there were demonstrations and general strikes in
According to inhabitants, Soviet troops were out on the streets on Saturday with helicopters circulating over the city. Overnight heavy troop reinforcements were reported to have been flown in. . ."
In the Russian press, 'The numerous articles analysing the appeal of the presidium have all denounced the Armenian strikers... the 11 members of the Karabakh committee were described as "adventurers", and irresponsibles'."
Yet September saw still more strikes in both the Karabakh and
The communal violence and the mass strikes and demonstrations abated temporarily with the Armenian earthquake of December 1988. But the I ISSR"s leaders showed only the same inability to provide solutions as over the previous nine months. Instead Gorbachev used a visit to the earthquake zone to denounce the Armenian Karabakh committee on nationwide TV, thumping a table with his fist as he did so. While troops arrested the committee's members," the Russian press took up the message, claiming, 'The "Karabakh" leaders are active—while various corrupt operators and local mafia godfathers are skimming off the cream.""
Kventually, early in 1989 Gorbachev imposed direct rule from
Gorbachev sent tens of thousands of heavily armed troops with tanks into Azerbaijan—but not to end the pogrom, from which most of Baku's Armenian population had already fled long before the troops imposed a state of seige of the city. He explained on television he was out to stop attempts to declare the republic independent of the USSR and to take down border posts which separated Soviet Azerbaijan from Iranian Azerbaijan (what the local population referred to as the 'Azerbaijan wall').
It was a decision which earnt him little praise from any quarter. The conservative elements inside the Russian bureaucracy, opposed to any concessions to the minority nationalities, could only ask why he had not moved harder and earlier to crush dissent. The radicals pointed out he had not moved in the troops when the pogroms were at their height, but only when the Azeris began to talk of secession from the union.
The conflicts in
But, as in the
The leadership of the Communist Party of Lithuania Central Committee lacked the resolve and strength to go on the offensive... The organisational and political paralysis increased after the March elections. In April J 989 Sajudis [the Lithuanian Popular Front] adopted a resolution on the independence [from
By the end of 1989 the Popular Fronts in the three republics were openly committed to full independence from the
National movements comparable in strength with those in the Baltic states were soon firmly entrenched in
The new movements showed two sorts of dynamic. The first and most threatening to the central bureaucracy in
As the local republican bureaucracies played the national card, and especially the language card, to enhance their own popularity and standing, the conservative elements in the Russian bureaucracy were able to build up 'intermovements' opposed to change which bound Russian speaking managers and workers together. In
It is difficult to tell how widespread and deep rooted the growth of Russian chauvinism and anti-semitism really is. But there is no doubt it was producing real fears among sections of the pro-Gorbachev intelligentsia by late 1989, as was shown by a discussion between a number of them in Moscow News.
There was almost panic over the way old conservative forces were said to be agitating and whipping up support from people. Ambartsumov said that, 'Our soaring hopes at the onset of perestroika have turned to disappointment today and sometimes even to malice.. .' According to Karpinsky:
‘The conservatives point to the universally acknowledged difficulties which the country is currently experiencing—the crisis in many parts of the economy, the shortages, the unbalanced market, the collapse of old relations before new ones are in place. . . The conservative forces thrive in an atmosphere of uncertain prospects and scarcities.’. .
‘An attempt is being made to connect the interests of the apparatus with the moods of certain strata of the population. . ‘
The
'The train is on fire, but there's no engine to pull us.' The lyric of the
“A wave of strikes has engulfed the economy. There is continual whipping up of tension, a continual sort of blackmail along the lines of 'if you don 't solve these issues, we shall go on strike. ":
National minorities were expressing their grievances from one end of the
“The general mood and political situation in the
The head of the official state run unions in the republic warned, 'Popular discontent is rising and may lead to mass labour conflicts'' Izvestia reported 'nervous tension throughout
“I feel I am watching a repeat of a film. . . Nine years later the miners of Kuzbass and Donbass would demonstrate there were many unfortunate similarities between the
The new institutions that were supposed to hold the country together on the basis of 'consent'—the Congress of Deputies and the revamped Supreme Soviet—simply reflected the divisions in society at large, although in a way which gave an exaggerated impression of the influence of the apparatus over events. They were split between a small minority of radical reformers, and, to the right of them, equally sized groupings of pro-Gorbachev 'moderates' and open conservatives. The idea that either the Congress or the Supreme Soviet held 'all power' looked more and more vacuous as they haggled over small items of procedure but allowed the politburo to do whatever it wanted to when it came to big issues.
The malaise went to the heart of the ruling party. For more than 60 years it had imposed an iron discipline on the differing interests within the economic and governmental bureaucracies, binding them into a single hierarchy under the general secretary and the politburo. Now the ruling party itself was ceasing to function in a unified way. This was shown at the meetings of the Central Committee, which brings together those who man the apparatus of the party itself, the major enterprises and ministries, and the police and army chiefs. As a perceptive Russian sociologist has said:
‘Symptoms of.. . growing confrontation between the party apparatus locally and the central leadership bodies of the party... appeared at the April [ 19891 plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, where open dissatisfaction was expressed in the speeches of a number of members and oblast committee secretaries with what they saw as the incorrect position of the politburo and secretariat in the leadership of the processes taking place in the party and country. This dissatisfaction was manifested to an even greater extent at party activists meetings and local party committee plenums held very recently.’
The mood of the July plenum was much the same, while the discussion at the December meeting was so bitter that the party leadership broke its usual practice and did not publish the transcript of the meeting. Reports suggest, however, that Gorbachev's opening address was immediately followed by a barrage of criticism from the floor, led off by the man Gorbachev had recently put in charge of
Up to now we knew that the 'new thinking' was meeting with opposition in various localities from conservatives and dogmatists. And then I heard for the first time charges against Gorbachev, that his line is wrong and that 'it's about time we all got on the right track'."
By the close of the year 'radicals' and 'conservatives' within the party were openly abusing each other, and, increasingly, both began to direct their fire at Gorbachev. Ominously for him, the close of the year saw rival rallies in the second city of the
Nor were the armed forces immune from the feeling of disintegration of society at large. At the base rank and file soldiers were involved in the various Popular Fronts, sitting on platforms, addressing meetings and joining a reform movement, Shield." There were reports of secret delegate meetings of Azeris from different units in Central Asia;!J in
Gorbachev, from seeming like the master of events in 1987 and 1988, increasingly seemed like their prisoner. He retired a whole section of the Central Committee and reshuffled the politburo, bringing on people who owed their advance to him and removing old 'conservatives' like Schcherbitsksy and Chebrikov. But his ability to guide events still diminished. He signed a decree banning 'unauthorised demonstrations'; they took place on a greater scale than before. He outlawed 'deliberate actions aimed at inciting national or racial enmity or dissension'; 'national dissension' grew as never before. He pushed through a law on strikes; people struck despite him. Late in August he approved a letter to the leaderships of the Baltic republics warning them against giving in to nationalist pressures. It was seen by all concerned as a veiled threat to send in Russian troops. Yet faced with a decision of the Lithuanian party to declare itself independent from the CPSU in December, all that Gorbachev seemed able to do was to pass another resolution through the Central Committee and beg the Lithuanian leaders to think again.
The party leadership and the military command did not simply ignore the growing ferment below. They did take very hard action in an effort to crush movements. They did ban publications, harass opposition groups, break up demonstrations. In April the interior ministry's special forces massacred dozens of demonstrators in
The Western media have long been ardent fans of Gorbachev. They saw him as taking a resolute revolutionary stand when he decided to amend Article Six of the
International policy: a double edged weapon
Gorbachev did have one success to which he could point until the autumn of 1989. This was his international policy. He had been able to extricate the last Soviet troops from
But there was a price to be paid for the strategy. It gave the Western powers, and especially the
What this meant was shown very clearly in the autumn of 1989. The regimes which embodied Russian influence over
No wonder that by the beginning of 1990 there was disillusionment with Gorbachev both among those who stood for a further democratisation of the
Established left orthodoxy has been stunned by the collapse of the Gorbachev experiment into economic chaos, social crisis and even civil war. But the collapse of the East European regimes has also undermined this orthodoxy's most important theoretical presumptions. For the established left has always insisted that in
But if the mode of production in
Marxists have usually argued that the transition from one mode of production to another involves a violent rupture between the old and the new. Trotsky, for instance, was insistent that a social counter-revolution could not have occurred in the
Yet the violence of Stalin's 'second revolution' in the late 1920s was much greater than anything we've seen in
The process of change began in
The attitude of the Solidarnosc leadership meant that the strikes were restricted to four major centres and did not generalise to anything like the same degree as in 1980-1.The strikes were certainly not on such a scale as to break the power of the ruling class and revolutionise society. What they did, however, was to create a bitter debate within the ruling layers of Polish society on how they should safeguard their own future. In the end they adopted the strategy suggested by the interior minister, Kisczcak. They agreed to round table discussions with the opposition and with 'independents' in return for the national leadership of Solidarnosc telling workers not to strike. Out of the round table came an agreement on semi-free elections and out of these acceptance by the leaders of the old ruling party that a Solidarnosc adviser should be prime minister in a government committed to restructuring, through agreement with the IMF, the command economy, and widescale privatisation.
The same people as before remained in charge of the enterprises, the police and the armed forces. The media were purged of those who had thrown their weight behind the previous period of military rule: journalists who had been sacked for supporting Solidarnosc were reinstated, but there were few other personnel changes in the press and television; judges were simply told to be 'politically neutral' from now on. Meanwhile, managers who had risen to their positions as part of the old nomenklatura now used their influence and wealth to buy up sections of industry. An estimated 15,000 co-operatives were set up by members of the nomenklatura." It is difficult to see in this sequence of events anything that could however remotely, be called a 'revolution' or a 'counter-revolution'.
In
The opening towards 'democracy' came not because of pressure from below, but because growing international indebtedness and fears of economic crisis created splits among the top party leaders. A handful of these conspired at the party congress in the spring of 1988 to oust the old party leader, Janos Kadar. They believed it was necessary to push economic reform even further towards a completely market system. They all endorsed what they openly referred to as 'Thatcherite' policies. They also agreed they needed to open up the political structures if they were to get the support they needed to carry out these measures. But then, as in
In the new political climate people who had refused to join the opposition groups in the past, either out of fear or because they craved the social advance open to supporters of the ruling party, suddenly rushed to join it. The opposition political demonstrations were suddenly hundreds of thousands strong. Even government ministers joined them. A dozen new parties were formed. The ruling party's candidates were defeated in a series of by-elections. Then the party itself formally split in two.
Yet in this whole process of change without confrontation there was a strong thread of continuity. Gaspar Tamas, a leader of one opposition party, the Free Democrats, has written:
Army, police and civil service are still not politically neutral... The economy will be nominally privatised, with the same bosses as proprietors even though they will not have put any of their own wealth at risk...
The majority of opposition politicians are bogus. The loudest recriminations against the Communist past come from people who only months or weeks ago were leading representatives of the party. The number two in the Christian Democrat Party has been a state prosecutor for 20 years."'
The changes in
The sudden weakness of the East German government gave new heart to the previously very small and easily repressed oppositional groups in the country. They staged their first demonstration, some thousands strong, in
The changes were sufficient to prompt the managers of
The changes did not mean any great changes in the personnel running the structures of the East German society. The position of the enterprise managers went completely unchallenged, as did those of the mass of officers in the armed forces and of state bureaucrats. The media remained in essentially the same hands as before, even if the opposition were allowed access and journalists were able, for the first time, to expose many of the nastier features of society. As one East German revolutionary socialist put it:
“The former economic structures have not been touched so far. This is specially visible in factories and the institutions in charge of the economy. There are changes in the factories. For instance, the SED groups in the factories no longer play any role. But as the actual management plays the same function, so nothing changes basically.
“The people's movement has so far only been directed against some positions of political power and through the pressure of the masses one generation went away and the next generation came into power to further the interests of those who run the economy."
The dynamic of change in
The attack is now referred to in
As in
In one sense there was a sharp contrast between events in
Yet, if this was a revolution, it was so only in the most narrow sense of a partial political change enforced from below. It was like 1830 in
The Czechoslovak revolutionary socialist Petr Kluvart, who works in the
In
But the sudden political crisis did provide the opposition with an unprecedented opportunity to mobilise. Suddenly it was able to organise legally and get some mention in the media. By the end of the year it felt powerful enough to threaten a general strike if the apparatus, which it described as 'still totalitarian', did not allow for wider democratisation. It got a promise of concessions in return for withdrawing the strike call."
This time, however, repression did not immediately crush the movement. In
There were demonstrations all that night as the crowd from the rally were joined by hundreds of thousands of people who could see from the television broadcast that the regime was in trouble. And the security police do not seem to have been able to hold the streets against them." The following day the demonstrators converged on the Central Committee building of the ruling party. Those at the front had soon pushed their way inside, seizing the weapons of security police, who fled in terror.
Ceausescu and his wife escaped from the roof of the building by helicopter, leaving the formal centre of political power in the country in the hands of the people. Inside the central committee building representatives of the crowd outside began to discuss how to fill the power vacuum.
At this point heads of the armed forces made their move. After providing initial support for Ceausescu and then adopting a studiously neutral stance as the security police battled with the demonstrators for control of the streets, they now declared for the revolution. The army began to take control from those who had actually taken all the risks in the previous two days. Soon a National Salvation Council was formally in charge. It was made up of generals, of colleagues of the old dictator who had fallen out with him before the end and of a handful of representatives of the students and street demonstrators.
The generals in the National Salvation Council ordered their troops to thwart a desperate counter-revolutionary bid by Ceausescu's security police, who had embarked on a series of terrorist attacks on civilian demonstrators. They tried and executed the Ceausescus on 25 December so as to prevent them acting as a focus for the counter-revolutionaries. But at the same time the generals also took action to weaken the strongest possible force against counter-revolution, the spontaneous popular activity that had destroyed Ceausescu's power only three days before. On the day of Ceausescu's execution a decree of the National Salvation Council declared:
“The army is the only one to possess arms. . . All those who have come into possession of arms and ammunition regardless of the circumstances must hand them in by 1200 hours. Those failing to respect these provisions will be punished most severely.”
A fortnight later the Salvation Council was banning students from holding a rally in the centre of
What occurred in
The failure of two theories
For the left to grasp what has been happening in Eastern Europe it needs a theory which can explain both the scale of the crisis affecting them and the ease with which most of the East European societies have been able to switch from describing themselves as 'actually existing socialism' to openly imitating the methods of Western capitalism.
The theory which has traditionally dominated on the left, that which called these societies 'socialist', 'post-capitalist' or 'degenerated workers' states' cannot do so. It has usually contended that their economies can expand indefinitely, something which was long regarded as gospel truth by the Western Communist Parties, including their Eurocommunist wings. I remember, for instance, attending (as a journalist) a Congress of the British Communist Party in 1977. The debate between Eurocommunists and pro-Russian 'tankies' was already raging. But no one challenged the official theses which contrasted the 'relentless advance' of the Eastern economies with the crisis in the West. It was a belief that the USSR had developed a superior economic system to that of the West which enabled the British Eurocommunist Monty Johnson to write that Stalin had been right against Trotsky in the 1920s and 1930s: 'Trotksy suffered from utmost defeatism' when he suggested 'the possibility of the productivity of labour growing faster in the predominant capitalist countries than in Russia. . .Stalin was able to say correctly after 1935 that Trotsky had been wrong and that... socialism has already been built in the main'."
The most popular version of the 'Trotskyist' degenerated workers' state account of the Eastern countries came to similar conclusions. The best known theorist of this trend, Ernest Mandel, wrote in 1956:
“The
He repeated his claim in the first edition of his book on the world crisis in 1978. He claimed that the growth rates achieved by the Eastern states were proof of their 'non-capitalist character' of their 'qualitative' superiority 'over the capitalist market economy' in their 'ability to avoid among other things the slow down and the great economic fluctuations, unemployment."" He added that the 'non capitalist countries' suffered only the effects of the world capitalist crisis. But such reasoning simply cannot explain why they should suddenly enter into deep economic, social and political crises of the sort we've witnessed in the last four years. There has been one 'post-capitalist' theory which has stressed the crisis prone nature of the
Place ourselves in a ludicrous position if we fixed to the Bonapartist oligarchy the nomenclature of a new ruling class just a few years or even a few months before its inglorious downfall."
And elsewhere he says:
“In case of a protracted war accompanied by the passivity of the world proletariat the internal contradictions in the
Such prognoses could not survive the industrialisation of the
The revelations of the last few year about the scale of economic crisis in the Eastern states have led the leaders of the Western Communist Parties to abandon their old euphoria. And those who have tried to use Trotsky's own formulation have followed suit, switching back to his 1930s account without ever mentioning that they put the opposite gloss on the theory for 50 years. Ernest Mandel now claims that 'the entire economy' lacks 'any form of economic rationality' because 'the bureaucracy is unable to base its material privileges on the coherent functioning (ie the reproduction) of the economic system, of its role in the production process.'
But simply turning the old euphoria upside down does not explain why a general economic and social crisis should have developed in the Eastern countries in the last decade and not earlier. Nor does it provide any counter-arguments to those who claim that, whatever its faults, Western capitalism is based on economic rationality and therefore must be a superior system. The 'post-capitalist' view all too easily flips right over into acceptance of arguments which see the Eastern states as inferior to Western capitalism. So it is that even Tariq Ali, in his book which claimed Gorbachev's reforms could work, accepts that conditions for Russian workers are in some ways worse than in the poorest 'third world' countries:
“A working man in Calcutta or the woman selling pottery on a street stall in Mexico City have afar greater choice in what they buy. . . than a Soviet car worker in Togliattigrad or steel worker in
The collapse of the optimism associated with 'post-capitalist' analyses of the Eastern states has led many to support theories which see these societies as run by a 'new class', which exploits the mass of the population but which is not capitalist. Such theories were put forward by Rizzi and Schachtman in the late 1930s, Djilas in the 1950s, and in the last two decades by Ticktin, Bence and Kis, Bahro, Carlo, Kagarlitsky and many others. All these writers have poured scorn on the claim of the Eastern states to be classless societies. Yet they have not been any more successful than the proponents of 'post-capitalist' theories in coming to terms with the real dynamic of economic and social development.
The earliest version of the theory held, in fact, to the same view of the economically progressive character of the Eastern states as the post-capitalist theories. Bruno Rizzi argued that 'the economic programme' of 'the new ruling class' was 'progressive'."' This view was repeated by Max Shachtman in his writings of 1940-1. Thus he wrote that:
“.Bureaucratic collectivism is part—an unforeseen, mongrelised, reactionary part, but apart nevertheless—of the collectivist epoch of human history. The social order of bureaucratic collectivism is distinguished from the social order of capitalism primarily in that the former is based upon a new and more advanced form of property, namely state property. That this form of property— a conquest of the Bolshevik revolution—is progressive, ie historically superior, to private property is demonstrated theoretically by Marxism and by the test of practice."'
The two Hungarians, Bence and Kis, writing in the mid-seventies under the pseudonym Rakovski, believed that the Eastern states had a slower technological development than Western capitalism. But they too assumed that any economic imbalances that arise can easily be overcome. They argued that 'for the masses... basic consumer needs are relatively continuously satisfied' and that 'we have no reason on the basis of our model to predict the collapse of the economic growth of Soviet type societies must follow'."' They concluded that the working class could not organise itself until there was a split—a 'polarisation'—within the ruling class, and that 'no developmental tendencies can be deduced from the general structure of the system which might point to the growth, with time, of the probability of such a polarisation.'*8 It is not surprising that such conclusions led Bence and Kis to argue that Marxism had little to offer East European oppositionists that they could not obtain from 'social scientists coming from a different background'.""
However, most modern versions of the 'new class' theory hold that the Eastern economies are inherently less dynamic than Western capitalism. This was Schachtman's position from the mid-1940s onwards" and it was a conclusion of Djilas's The New Class. More recently it has featured in the writings of those around Hillel Ticktin and the magazine Critique. Ticktin, for instance, writes, 'The central economic feature of the
Ticktin's analysis is taken over, more or less wholesale, by another new class theorist, Furedi. For him the form of economic organisation is completely irrational:
“No mechanism exists with which to govern society's labour time. . Isolated individuals and production units make things in an increasingly random manner without any effective mechanism for regulating input or output. . . The Soviet social formation has no inherent tendency to socialise labour or to establish a national division of labour….There is simply no drive towards innovation or dynamism at the enterprise level.'*
This irrationality means 'it is the lack of a developmental dynamic that dictates the actions of the bureaucracy"; one way in which the 'social formation' differs fundamentally from capitalism, for Furedi, is that 'in the
Analyses which contend that the Eastern economies have always been in crisis can hardly explain the sudden worsening of the situation in the last few years, any more than those which have denied the possibility of crisis. What is more, they deny the crude historical fact that these societies did experience decades of economic growth. Thus Furedi claims that 'the tendency towards economic contraction has been the dominant feature of the Soviet system ever since. . . 1958'. Some contraction: CIA figures suggest that the
The state capitalist ruling classes did exhibit considerable self confidence for a whole historic period—building a degree of internal social support for their rule and creating a mixture of fear and admiration among rulers elsewhere in the world. To put the argument crudely, the
A theory of the Eastern states which does not explain both their dynamism over decades and their current crisis cannot be an adequate theory. The pessimistic new class theorists and those 'post-capitalist' theorists who have flipped over to accept their most important conclusions are popular because they go along with what is increasingly the orthodoxy of both the Western media and advisers to the Eastern governments: that Western style market capitalism is intrinsically more efficient and dynamic than any alternative.
The new orthodoxy
The claims of this new orthodoxy are so widespread that they have become almost a 'common sense' for left and right in East and West alike. Pick up almost any newspaper and you can read that 'nothing works' in Eastern Europe (have the writers ever compared travelling on the Moscow metro to the London underground?), that 'money is worthless' in the Eastern countries (so why do workers in these countries raise wage demands when they strike?), that the ecological crisis is worse there than anywhere in the capitalist world (which makes one wonder whether the Amazon forests or the steel works at Gary, Indiana are in the East or West!). What is meant to be an intelligent business magazine, the Economist, went so far in 1988 as to claim there had been no economic growth in the USSR for 20 years, ' while Martin Walker of the Guardian misquoted Gorbachev to the effect that, 'For 20 years, if you exclude the state's revenue from vodka and exporting oil, there has been no growth in the Soviet economy".
The most common claim is that the East European states would now be as advanced as those in Western Europe had they followed open market policies for the last 40 years. If they did not, it is said, it was because of 'Marxist dogma' (the right wing view) or because of the 'irrationality of the bureaucracy' (the view of Ticktin, Furedi and others). Against this any serious analysis of the Eastern states has to take into account some elementary truths.
First, as that hardly 'soft on Communism' source, the CIA, reveals, until recently the
More to the point perhaps, all the East European economies were markedly more successful in their first two decades as centralised command economies than they had been in the inter-war years as 'free market' capitalisms:
The average rate of growth achieved in the region during the first two decades of central planning (1950-70) was better than the peak rates shown in the best interwar years (1925-29). The two least developed countries grew as fast as the two fastest growing countries in the best interwar five year period,
However inept the running of the post-war Polish economy has been, no one can claim it did not experience considerable growth between 1948 and 1980. By contrast: 'Interwar Poland never seems to have regained the 1913 output on comparable territory, and a modest rise in
The Eastern system has not been an absolutely irrational form of economic organisation. It has been a form that could prompt enormous economic growth up to a certain point, but which then ran into crisis.
State capitalism
There is one Marxist account of the East European states that can come to terms with this contradictory development. That is the theory of state capitalism—a theory developed originally to explain the character of the society over which Stalin ruled in the USSR1"' was later used to explain developments in Eastern Europe,""
The theory focused on two interconnected aspects of the Eastern states. The first was the central position which accumulation of the means of production has played in their economic developments. This is something which is either ignored by other theories of these countries" or taken for granted as a feature of all forms of society."4 The point is that compulsive accumulation is a feature of capitalism and of no previous form of society. In previous societies there could be development of the means of production. But this took place spasmodically. Only in capitalism does accumulation become, in Marx's words, 'Moses and all the prophets'. It is this which leads Marx to make a sharp distinction between what happens to a whole range of established social institutions and beliefs under capitalism and the societies which preceded it:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence of all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relationships, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new ones become antiquated before they can ossify.'"
Marx also makes it clear that there could be no question of compulsive accumulation featuring in his conception of socialism. Compulsive accumulation is the visible expression of alienation, of the domination of human beings by the products of their labour. Socialism is the overcoming of this alienation. And so he writes in the Communist Manifesto:
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.'"'
That there is a compulsion to accumulate built into the working of the Eastern economies is not difficult to prove. It is shown by the whole development of the
OUTPUT
1928: consumer goods were 60.5 percent of output
1940.........................................39 percent
1960..........................................27.5 percent
1985...........................................25.2 percent
Finally, he points out:
“The shift towards the manufacture of producer goods has put us in the paradoxical situation where accelerated rates of development and more rapid growth in national income have very little effect on the standard of living. The economy is working more and more for itself, rather than for man.”
Or, as Marx himself put it:
“So far as he is personified in capital, it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them that spurs [the capitalist] to action, but exchange value and it augmentation... Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake.. . Therefore save, save, ie reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus value into capital! Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake."
In the case of the Eastern European states the proportion of the national output going to accumulation has, according to official figures, usually been 25 percent or higher. ' If the figures are recalculated to take account of distortions in the official price mechanism, the proportion can rise to as high as 40 percent."1' Such a drive to accumulate affects the whole life of society. It means that living standards are continually squeezed in one way or another so as to provide the resources for accumulation. It means that the ruling class has tried through repression to discourage any independent organisation by the exploited classes:
'Western' capitalisms with a similar level of accumulation (
Finally, it is this which explains a much noted feature of the 'planning' mechanism—the fact that it draws up 'taut' plans which try to squeeze resources out of the economy that often simply do not exist and then runs into bottlenecks which bring work on a high proportion of investment undertakings to a halt, leading to widespread economic chaos. In much the same way classic 'free market' capitalism in the West tends to rapid accumulation during periods of boom which cannot be sustained, thus suddenly giving way to slump.
The empirical fact of forced accumulation cannot be separated from another feature of the Eastern economies, the way in which their development is linked to that of the wider world system around them. People often argue that the Eastern states cannot be capitalist because there has been no internal competition between enterprises. Such competition was important in Marx's account of capitalism because it compelled each individual enterprise to reduce its costs to a minimum by holding down wage rates and forcing up work speeds. It forced the enterprise to invest as much of its profit as it could on new equipment and on innovation. The development of capitalism itself in the 20th century led, as we have seen, to the state intervening to reduce internal competition to a minimum. But, as Lenin and Bukharin pointed out, far from ending competition between capitals, it shifted it to a higher level, to competition on an international scale. And this competition began to take on new forms, including armed conflict between capitalist states as well as, and sometimes instead of, purely economic competition for markets. Internal competition may decline to a near zero level—external competition takes its place.
The Stalinist states were never cut off from the rest of the world. Already in the 1950s in
Such a level of foreign trade necessarily has an enormous impact on the internal running of the economy. It means that those who control the state and industry have continually to worry about how costs of production inside the country compare with the average costs in the rest of the world: that is, they have to hold down wages, keep up a continual pressure to force speed up on workers and aim at levels of investment that will enable the national economy to match the effort of economies elsewhere in the world. In other words, although individual enterprises may not be directly involved in competition with other enterprises, the national economy as a whole is.
But it is not only competition for foreign markets which has a profound impact on the internal operation of the Eastern states. So has their participation in the military competition between the Eastern bloc and the West and
Most arms are not commodities in the pure meaning of the term. They are not sold to an unknown buyer in competition with other sellers, but rather go straight to the government which has supervised their production.'2* But arms have one very important thing in common with commodities intended for the market. Their value to whoever possesses them depends not on their intrinsic physical properties (their use values) but on how they compare, in terms of price and efficiency, with those possessed by rivals. Two countries which manufacture tanks for war with each other are, in one respect, in the same relation with each other as two countries which manufacture cars which they try and sell in competition with each other. Success depends on holding down wages, pushing up productivity as much as possible and using profits for investment to increase the level of investment in plant and innovation. It is this which explains the very high levels of accumulation in the Russian economy under Stalin: as the Russian bureaucracy saw it, this was the only way to lay down the heavy industrial base needed for military preparedness. It also explains, for example, similarities in the pattern of industrial development in post-war
State capitalism as a stage in capitalist development
Using the theory of state capitalism, it is possible to make sense of the Stalin period and the early years of Stalinist rule in
Insofar as
Engels could not, of course, foresee capitalist industrialisation and the suffering being imposed by a bureaucracy which tried to conceal its class nature behind Marxist phrases. The people who lost their lives in this development did so in the space of no more than 25 years. But it is unlikely that in proportion to the total population it is higher than those who died from the combined effects of the enclosures and vagrancy laws of the Tudor period, the 250 years of the transatlantic slave trade, the barbarities of the plantation system, the clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, the shipping of grain from Ireland during the famine, the poverty into which whole areas of India were forced by British rule, and the effects of the opium trade on China.
At the same time, the tendency towards state control of the whole economy was not something unique to Stalinism. It was something which happened to varying degrees throughout the capitalist world, particularly in its weaker national elements, in the period which stretched from the First World War and the crisis of 1929-3 through to the 1970s.
Those who wanted to build up new industries in countries where capitalism was late in developing found the only way in which they could do so in the face of competition from the established capitalist powers was by using the forces of the state to concentrate the available resources. Already at the turn of the century the state played a central role in the development of large scale industry in
In the 1930s and 1940s the most efficient size for productive units was such that a handful of local firms dominated the market in manufactured goods in each of the economically advanced countries. It made economic sense to merge these into a single structure, integrated by the capitalist state, excluding foreign competitors through tariffs and quotas. Even where rival firms persisted inside the major sectors of an economy, governments saw their task as making sure domestically based firms covered the market for most ranges of goods: every capitalist country sought to have its steel industry, its shipbuilding industry, its aircraft industry, its auto industry, even its furniture and white goods industries. State capitalism corresponded to the stage of development of the productive forces when this was a conceivable goal.
The trend went furthest in countries where indigenous industrial development was weakest. In the 1930s and 1940s the state moved to the fore in the economic development of countries as diverse as Mussolini's Italy (where the two biggest conglomerates were state owned), Peron's Argentina, Vargas' Brazil, Nerhu's India (where the main industrial families had, before independence, agreed upon an economic programme based on five year plans in imitation of the Russian example), China under both Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Zedong, and, a few years later, Nasser's Egypt, the rival Ba'athist regimes in Iraq and Syria, Boumidienne's Algeria and the military regime in Burma.
The rationale for such moves was simple: in this period of capitalism it seemed possible to lay the basis for industrial development through state intervention in a way that was not possible otherwise. The economic success stories in the 'third world' were those where there was strong state intervention, not where everything was left to the market. So it was that the dominant ideologies, whether Keynesian, social democratic or Stalinist, took state intervention for granted.
In none of these cases was there a shift from 'one mode of production' to another. In each case those who had control of the existing state apparatus used it to reorganise industry, reducing internal competition to a minumum so as to accumulate in the face of external pressures. That does not mean there was never any opposition to such a move—'police' actions of various sorts were often taken against old, 'private' capitalist interests who resisted the changes. But these were possible without the mobilisation of the mass of the population for full blooded social revolution, indeed in some cases without any mobilisation of the mass of the population at all.
The origins of East European state capitalism
Eastern Europe before and during the Second World War provided many graphic examples of old state structures resorting piecemeal to state capitalist measures.
Everywhere the world crisis of 1929-34 had devastating results. All the Eastern countries except
The pre-war East European governments knew of only one way to control such tensions—to disregard their previous 'liberal' economic policies. Already before 1929 the states operated 'controls not at all, or hardly, used in Western countries'."4 The crisis of the 1930s led one state after another to intervene directly to control foreign trade, to organise directly bilateral deals with other states (especially Nazi Germany, which itself had imposed a state monopoly of foreign trade), to reduce massively the level of imports, to establish differential exchange rates for different transactions, and to take control of failing banks and industrial concerns. Thus the right wing colonels' government in
The Second World War increased the tendency to state control of the economy enormously. First, the economies of
The economic plight of most of the countries was made worse by the policies of the victors in the war. Those countries whose old rulers had supported Hitler (
Finally, in the case of East Germany, the national borders imposed by the victors did considerable economic damage: its industries were cut off from their traditional sources of fuel—hard coal—by the handing over of Silesia to Poland and the setting up of a separate West German state (which is the reason the country's power stations burn highly polluting locally mined lignite today).
Those who found themselves in control of Eastern Europe after the war were running countries which were already much more backward than Western Europe before the war, had been worse affected by the war and its aftermath, but where events had given the state the power to direct the organisation of production with very little obstruction from private capitalist interests. Not surprisingly, the leaders of all the political parties—bourgeois and social democrat as well as Stalinist—took it for granted that the only way forward for the economies was to use that state power.
In
Methods of highly centralised administrative planning and management widely using meta-economic coercion are not a characteristic feature of socialism, but rather a sui generis technique of the war economy""
The leaders of the Communist Parties did become the most determined proponents of the command economy after the outbreak of the Cold War and the formation of the Cominform (Stalin's organisation for coordinating the activities of the ruling Communist Parties). From mid-1947 onwards they pressed for a much higher rate of accumulation than did the social democrat and bourgeois parties.14' Again, this was not a result of some irrational ideology, but because of their commitment to building up the industrial-military potential of the Russian bloc as a whole. Significantly, those opposed to their approach were not able to develop a coherent alternative view of their own. That is why even in
Seen from this viewpoint, what happened in
The contradictions of capitalism
To analyse a society as capitalist is not only to point to the exploitative, barbaric way in which its rulers treat the rest of the population—after all, such behaviour is typical of all class societies. It is also to see that the ruling class, forced to accumulate at all costs, cannot avoid undercutting the basis of its own rule. This was certainly true of the Eastern ruling classes. They could not avoid what were, for them, a number a negative consequences of accumulation.
(i) The gravedigger. The Stalinist methods necessarily began to create a social force capable of challenging the rule of the bureaucracy. When Stalin took absolute power in 1928-9 in the
The Stalinist regimes found it relatively easy to subdue the rural populations in the early years, using armed force if necessary, as during Stalin's own collectivisation campaigns. At the same time, the initial effect of forced industrialisation was to weaken the ability of the working class to offer opposition to the regime. An important minority of 'old' workers were able to achieve upward mobility out of their class as supervisors and bureaucrats: figures for the 1960s show that 29 percent of people born into working class families in Czechoslovakia had risen into non-manual jobs and in Hungary and Poland 17 percent had done so.114 Those 'old' workers who remained found their traditions of collective action diluted by the flooding of the towns with masses of ex-peasants. As the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann has noted in regard to
A relatively meagre group of pre-war industrial workers, who remained workers in spite of all mobility opportunities.. .suffered an almost continuous deterioration in their living standards. .. But they were dissolved in a vast mass of peasant migrants to whom the living conditions they met meant a genuine improvement in the standards they had known."s
But as capital accumulation proceeded, it began to change this state of affairs. The decline in the proportion of the population in agriculture necessarily led to a decline in the number of people entering the cities from the countryside. At the same time the opportunities for workers gaining upward mobility into white collar and bureaucratic positions declined.*
A growing proportion of workers were the children of workers and had experienced no mobility in their own lifetimes. So a study of the
The level of culture which is required of the workforce also changes with capital accumulation. In the 1930s and 1940s crude threats and punishments could persuade the mass of ex-peasants in the factories, mines and construction sites to carry through the unskilled and semiskilled tasks required for basic industrialisation. By the time Stalin died in 1953 this was already changing. A higher average level of skills and more initiative were required of the workers. In 1965 unskilled labour accounted for 40 percent of workers in industry and 60 percent in construction; by 1979 the proportion had fallen to 33 and 40 percent respectively.14"
Such skilled labour could not be obtained without at least some secondary education for the great majority of workers and further education of some kind for a substantial minority. So in the Gorki region the number of workers without complete secondary education fell from 87 percent in 1965 to 52 percent in 1979, and only 20 percent among those under 30 years of age. Among young workers in the
“Many enterprises in the
(ii) Obsolescence of old forms of exploitation. The more accumulation proceeds, the less old methods of achieving it are effective. The first phase of Stalinist industrialisation could be carried through by using the most primitive methods to force unskilled ex-peasants to work. The low productivity of labour didn't matter that much, since millions of people were leaving agriculture for industrial occupations and their labour could build and work factories where none had existed before. Massive industrialisation was possible on an 'extensive' basis.
But eventually old reserves of labour and raw material began to be used up. Further industrial advance had then to be through 'intensive' development: rebuilding and reorganising existing industry so as to use labour and materials much more efficiently. This depends on a much greater exercise of care and initiative by the workers. Attempts have to be made to raise the commitment of the workers to their labour by offering them better food, more leisure and a bigger supply of consumer goods.'"
This contradicts attempts to catch up with more developed, and usually larger, economies by devoting a very high proportion of the national income to accumulation. It is all too easy for a chicken and egg situation to occur: if workers' consumption levels were increased, then over time productivity would rise. But in the interim it is only possible to raise living standards by cutting into accumulation and slowing down the growth rate of the economy compared to its major competitors. So it is that the history of the
The situation is made worse by the impact of the past subordination of consumption to production. In the
The effects of this policy have faced all of Stalin's successors with near insuperable problems. The investment of considerable sums in fertilisers, farm machinery and increasing agricultural workers' wages to near the urban level is not nearly as productive as it should be. An unnecessarily high proportion of the crop is lost due to poor transport and storage facilities. And the rural population is, on average, too old and unskilled to respond to the 'incentive' of higher living standards. Successive generations of young men and women have reacted to miserable living conditions in the countryside by heading for the town the moment they have learnt some marketable skills (like driving a lorry or repairing machinery).
Living standards do rise, but not by nearly enough to increase productivity to the levels prevailing in the advanced Western countries. If productivity does not rise fast enough, the only way for those who direct the economy centrally to obtain high levels of accumulation they have set is to switch factories producing consumer goods over to the production of means of production. But this in turn means that the amount managers pay out in wages exceeds the total value of consumer goods and food output. There are shortages of many key consumer goods and a tendency for prices to rise.
From growing at a faster rate than the Western economies in their early years the Eastern state capitalisms begin to grow at only the same speed (or even slower), and to experience acute crises in supplying whole ranges of consumer goods.
(iii) The rising organic compostition of capital. State capitalism faces the classic problem of any capitalism—as accumulation causes total investment to rise faster than the labour force, the average return on the investment tends to decline." The average annual increment of industrial output per rouble of investment in Russia" has decreased as follows: 1951-5: 6.4 percent, 1956-60: 5.1 percent, 1961-65: 4.7 percent. The trend continued through the whole Brezhnev period. In 1985 the proportion of the national product going to investment was at least as high as in 1965, but the growth rate of industry was down by between 50 and 60 percent.
(iv) Social production and national state appropriation. Finally, the very thing which made state capitalism seem a way out of the problems facing countries at one stage in the development of world system—the continual growth of the forces of production—makes state capitalism seem an impediment to economic efficiency at a later stage. The further development of the forces of production over four or five decades began to clash with any such way of organising production.
The most successful enterprises in the West became those which began not merely to sell internationally, but also to organise production internationally. Multinational capitalism began to supplant state capitalism as the vanguard of the system. National ruling classes which attempted to keep the domestic market for the whole range of goods in the hands of nationally based firms began to discover that these firms simply could not mobilise the level of resources required to match the most advanced enterprises in the world system. Production that was restricted by narrow national boundaries was increasingly inefficient and technologically backward.
This was even true for the world's biggest economy, that of the
For American capitalism there is another side to this process. At the same time as losing market share on their home ground some of the giant
The shift from national capitalism to multinational capitalism does not do away with the economic role of the national state in supporting 'national' firms. Boeing can only dominate the world civil aircraft industry because of the sustenance it gets from US military orders; Ford and General Motors have used the US state to provide them with some protection against a complete Japanese takeover of their 'home market' while they have been extending their own multinational operations and making some deals with Japanese firms. While having an increasingly multinational orientation, the privatised British Aerospace has remained dependent on British government orders and influence for an estimated 80 percent of its business. In the rapidly expanding and lucrative area of telecommunications, the ability of firms to make multinational links depends upon the extent to which they can gain the support of governments when it comes to getting orders to re-equip rational telephone systems.
World capitalism has outgrown the stage of state capitalism. But it would be wrong to label what has replaced it as 'private capitalism' or even 'market capitalism', as if the role of the state had disappeared. What exists is a combination of state capitalism and multinational capitalism. I call it 'multinational capitalism' for short, but its components develop from national state capitalist bases and never completely break from them.'"'
This new phase does, however, destroy the conditions under which the old nationally self contained state capitalisms could flourish. This was already clear more than 20 years ago from the attempts to create new state capitalisms. China and Cuba discovered they could not successfully copy the path pioneered by the Stalinists in the USSR— hence the bitter internal conflicts which led to the Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966 in China', and the crisis in Cuba which led to Che Guevara leaving the government in 1966.
The costs of starting up a whole range of industries capable of holding their own against those of the established industrial powers was now too great for the limited resources of the national ruling classes of poorer countries. This point was shown graphically when it was estimated that producing the Chinese H-bomb must have used up between a quarter and a half of the country's total electricity output. The reality was 'that the minimum cost of entry into the world market is growing every day. The resources from which to fund it in backward countries are not.The result was to:
“close the period in which a Russian-type state capitalist development could be thought feasible for backward countries... in which the bloody, treacherous forced march through autarkic industrialisation could be thought to constitute progress in some restricted sense...'
Those rulers who tried from this point onwards to implement the dream of national state capitalist development found they were embarked on a policy that led, in fact, to national crisis and even collapse. The regimes which followed the defeat of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique were forced into a bitter retreat towards the Western powers by this prospect; the Vietnamese regime would love to make this retreat but finds its path blocked by American obduracy; the attempt of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia to push ahead with old style 'development plans' led to all the old barbarism of Stalinism without the industrial advance which had accompanied it in the USSR.
This may not have been the end of economic development in the 'third world'. But from now on 'development' was only possible for state capitalisms which concentrated their resources into breaking into a very narrow range of industries, usually in collaboration with established multinationals, in the hope of breaking into one or two sectors of the world market—as some of the relatively small countries of the 'Pacific rim' succeeded in doing. Many of the countries which tried to follow this path fell by the wayside. In others, like
The crisis of state capitalism
For a time the old established state capitalisms seemed to have a brighter future than the late comers who tried to emulate them. A series of convulsions had swept the whole Eastern Bloc in 1953-6 as people reacted against the terror, the slave camps and the forcing down of popular consumption levels of the Stalinist period of primary state capitalist accumulation. In the
But the East European leaders and Khrushchev in the
Symptoms of a new cycle of crisis began to reveal themselves in the mid-1960s. Khrushchev's various attempts at reform inside the USSR could not raise the country's rate of growth to the level needed not merely to sustain itself as the second superpower, but to 'catch up and overtake' the US. The leaders of the different sections of the bureaucracy came together to overthrow Khrushchev in 1964. In
“The bureaucracy becomes entrapped in a vicious circle. Any way it attempts to solve some of its problems is likely to increase others.
“The leaders of the central apparatus will increasingly seem to be an impediment to efficient production... The bureaucracy is unable to carry through reforms on anything like a successful basis without a split of the proportions that characterised
“The chronic crisis of state capitalism will reach a nodal point at which the whole system is threatened. What happens then will depend on the ability of the different classes to mobilise around programmes reflecting their genuine interests.'
But all the regimes were able to re-stabilise in the immediate aftermath of the 1968-71 events just as they had after 1953-6. Brezhnev's
In
The rulers of
This was most obviously the case with countries like
A series of amendments to Hungarian law permitted the formations of hundreds of joint enterprises with Western firms and massive borrowing from Western banks. Other Eastern states were more subdued in their direct dealing with Western firms and banks. But there were still deals. Western firms were involved in the construction of the giant Russian auto plants at Togliattigrad and Kama River; in the single year 1976 the USSR bought 3.6 billion dollars worth of heavy machinery and plant from West German firms;"' the construction, with Western help, of the huge gas pipeline from Northern Russia to Western Europe was central to the USSR's economic development in the early 1980s; there was growing co-operation between East German and West German enterprises with, for example, the manufacture under licence in East Germany of car engines for Volkswagen. By mid-October 1989 there were 2,090 joint ventures registered in the
On top of this the Brezhnev leadership in the USSR had sought to make up for the ingrained backwardness of its agricultural sector by buying grain on long term contracts from the US, paying for these with the income from oil exports after the massive increases in the international price of oil in 1973-4 and 1979-80.
Such a piecemeal approach to dealing with deep seated economic problems necessarily ran into difficulties. Somehow economies which were already working at full capacity had to find the resources to pay for imports of foreign goods and technology. In the early 1970s borrowing from the Western banks seemed the way round this problem for the Polish, Hungarian and Yugoslav regimes. They assumed they would be able to pay off their debts from the proceeds of exports to Western markets. But the world recessions of 1974-6 and 1980-2 put paid to this option. As markets stagnated and interest rates soared, the rulers of these Eastern states found themselves in exactly the same position as those of 'newly industrialising countries' like Brazil and Argentina: the cost of paying for past borrowing began to cut off possibilities for further accumulation: in 1979-80 Poland entered a long period of economic stagnation, interspersed with spells of contraction; Hungary, still treated by most pro-market Western commentators as the 'miracle economy' of Eastern Europe in the early 1980s,'75 was predictably dominated by its own debt problems half a decade later.'"
Fear of such an outcome combined with conservative inertia in other states such as Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Brezhnev's USSR to put a check on the scale of the opening up to the world market; Romania under Ceausescu went from one extreme to the other, incurring huge debts in the 1970s and then cutting right back on imports of any sort (apart from luxury goods for the dictator's entourage) in order to pay them off.
The conservative path consisted of trying to hang onto the old model of nationally self contained state capitalism at a time when the recessions of 1974-6 and 1980-82 had given a massive added impetus in the West and the 'third world' to restructuring national industries to fit in with the needs of multinational production. Inevitably important sectors of the Eastern economies began to lag behind the most advanced world levels of technology. In the 1950s the
Attempts to keep up with the most advanced technology internationally were, increasingly, expensive and often ineffective. The East German firm Robotron, for instance, put an enormous effort into attempting to compete in computer technology and software with the West. Its achievements were quite considerable, but not nearly enough to keep up with the much greater resources being concentrated in such areas by certain Western multinationals. American based multinationals were in fact being driven out of the production of many sorts of basic microchips in this period by Japanese multinationals because they simply did not have the resources to compete any more. The industry of a small state like
Similarly, a Czech enterprise was competent at making the full range of electrical goods produced in the West—from refrigerators and food mixers to computers. But it necessarily did so with much greater production costs on its short production runs than the giant Western multinationals, each of which would concentrate on only part of that production range. Again the Czech or East German motor industries, producing only a few hundred thousand cars altogether each year, could not possibly afford the technological development and tooling open to the top ten Western multinationals, which produced millions each year.
The growing lag in technology had important effects in three areas. Firstly, there were deficiencies when it came to the most advanced means of production. Increasingly advanced computers and engineering equipment could only be obtained by buying them in the West. But that meant somehow getting hold of the foreign currency to buy them with— assuming they were not on the Western powers, Cocom list of embargoed exports.
Secondly, it was increasingly difficult to sustain the burden of advanced weapons production. The
Of the more than 100 countries for which there are authentic statistics only five or six Middle Eastern states spend more on defence than the
The USSR has been able to produce aircraft, tanks and guns as good any produced in the West, but only by draining away resources needed for the development of high quality output in the rest of the economy.
Finally, even where the regimes succeeded in satisfying workers' basic material requirements (food, clothing, alcoholic drink, housing), as in
The theory of state capitalism made it possible to see, as early as the mid-1970s, that neither opening up to the West nor trying to restrict such opening up was able to prevent the slide of the Eastern states towards economic stagnation and political crisis."' The Polish events of the early 1980s made the picture even clearer:
By 1981, the choice between maintaining the closed economy and opening up to the rest of the world was indeed the choice between the frying pan and
the fire. The first option meant deepening stagnation, growing waste, an inability to satisfy the demands of the mass of the population, and the continual danger of working class rebellion. The second option meant binding oneself into the rhythm of a world economy increasingly prone to stagnation and recession—and giving up the administrative means to stop recession involving contraction of the domestic economy. That is why the Polish crisis of 1980-81 was so traumatic for all the rulers of
'Pre-crisis' and perestroika
The leaders of the
The 'pre-crisis' symptoms were not just in the economy. The army had become bogged down in a war in
By the time Gorbachev took over in 1985 the symptoms of crisis were more visible than ever. He could hardly avoid looking desperately to what the party was soon describing as 'the dramatic nature of the situation in which the country found itself in April 1985.""'
Both at the centre and in the localities many leaders continued to act by outdated methods and proved unprepared for work in the new conditions.
“Discipline and order deteriorated to an intolerable level. The vicious practice of downward revision of plans became widespread."
The party described the Brezhnev period as that of 'stagnation' which had
“brought the country to the brink of an economic crisis. A far reaching, high spending system of economic management outgrew its usefulness. Its structure and expertise are at variance with modern requirements. .. Production, efficiency and living standards ceased to grow..."
In its first year the new Gorbachev leadership tried to achieve the economic 'restructuring' using the same methods which Andropov had used—single minded campaigns directed from the top, using only the existing apparatus in an effort to drive people harder. There was a campaign against alcohol's alleged detrimental effect on productivity which involved increasing the price, closing down two thirds of the sales outlets and destroying thousands of acres of the vines. There were onslaughts against corruption among many of the old generation of party bureaucrats who had held onto power through the two decades of Brezhnev's rule. There was the establishment of a central agency to check the quality of enterprise output, and to cut the pay of those who worked in low quality enterprises. There was even a call by Gorbachev for people to take up the example of Stalin's 1930s Stakhanovite movement.""
But the attempts to shake up the economy from the top down did not work. In the course of 1986 most of the group around Gorbachev became convinced that the only way to change the economy was to implement a root and branch transformation of the bureaucratic-managerial structure itself. They saw that this could not be achieved without introducing changes of a political as well as economic nature. Conservative bureaucrats, it was said, were obstructingperestroika, and their efforts had to be countered by allowing the media to throw light on their activities through glasnost.
The economic programme of perestroika involved, initially, three interconnected sets of changes. Firstly, the restructuring of production away from old plant and machinery to newer plant and machinery. This was to be achieved by factory closures and redundancies on the one hand, and the introduction of three shift working on the other. Eventually this is meant to entail 16 million sackings. So far more than three million have occurred."" Secondly, the whittling down of the size of the bureaucratic apparatus controlling industry and the replacement of bureaucrats and managers who are inept, inefficient or corrupt. The increased freedom of criticism in the media would aid in this. Finally, the replacement of bureaucratic attempts to make industry efficient by those based on market forces. The use of 'commandist' methods of 'vertical' co-ordination of the efforts of different enterprises was to be replaced by 'horizontal' links as the enterprises arrived freely at contracts for each other's output. The pursuit of maximum profits would, it was claimed, lead the managers of each enterprise to put a premium on efficient use of resources and the rapid adoption of new techniques. The three elements were meant to be dependent on each other. The move from command to market co-ordination would reveal which were the most efficient plants and give managers an incentive to concentrate production there. Trimming down the layers of bureaucratic control was a precondition for the shift to horizontal links, which would in turn throw light on the efficiency or otherwise of individual managers. But things did not turn out as hoped. The partial replacement of vertical by horizontal links in 1988 did not lead to any magical rise in the level of efficiency:
The problem of supplying the population with food has worsened.
“Everything in the economy is in short supply, concluded a report in January 1989 on Russian television from a meeting of the council of ministers. It told of a growing number of goods in short supply, two million square meters less of housing space than planned, and a fall in the number of new children 's preschool establishments opened.
And prices were rising. 'Neither the factories nor the shops have any interest in providing cheap goods—it does not pay'.' Many managers had discovered that they could increase their profits, and their own bonuses, simply by raising their prices. Where they had not been able to do this directly, they shifted from producing cheap selling ranges of goods to more expensive ones. But, since the goods produced by one enterprise were often desperately needed as inputs by another enterprise, this caused chaos all round.
What is more, the openness, which Gorbachev saw as necessary if he was to get restructuring through, increased economic problems. In the spring and early summer of 1988 Gorbachev was able to use the slogan of glasnost as a weapon against conservative attempts to limit perestroika. In the run up to the special party conference he gave the
Gorbachev's whole political career had been within the political-managerial bureaucracy. He moved upwards during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years by learning how to ingratiate himself with those above him, to manoeuvre against those alongside him and browbeat into submission those below him. These were skills he used to the full over the spring and summer months—together with his considerable skills as a publicist. They enabled him to carry through a manoeuvre against his opponents which concentrated massive power in his own hands and, he thought, laid the basis for a real assault on those bureaucrats below who would obstruct restructuring.
Those skills did not, however, prepare him for something else—how to deal with the reactions of millions of people outside the ruling bureaucracy as glasnost gave them, for the first time since the late 1920s, the chance to discuss the conditions under which they lived. The pale promise of glasnost from above was enough to unleash a vast wave of glasnost from below.
At first this seemed mainly a phenomenon confined to the
These were attempts to limit the influence of radical opinion in
More important, though, was what had been happening outside
The arguments in the run-up to the special party conference suddenly gave them an opportunity for real mass activity as sections of the apparatus gave the go-ahead to campaign against the appointment of particularly corrupt or unpopular figures as delegates. Small groups who took advantage of the opening could suddenly find themselves leading protests thousands strong. As the left wing oppositionist Kagarlitsky'"" noted, 'A wave of demonstrations swept the country.' And protesters almost everywhere began to raise questions which went beyond the question of who was the delegate. So for instance, at a meeting of 5,000 people in Yaroslav,
‘The stream of speeches at the rally seemed unending. People were talking not just about party conference electoral procedure, but also about poor supplies in the town, about the acute shortage of hospitals and housing and about instances of violation of principles of social justness. Many personal grievances were also aired. The heap of requests for permission to speak grew higher and higher.’
When the party leadership had told the conference there had to be 'a permanent mechanism for comparing views, for criticism and self criticism in the party and society' it had hastened to add, 'Discussions.. .mustn't lead to political confrontation, to disunity of social forces'. But confrontation there was. As well as the explosion of discontent among the non-Russian nationalities there was a continuing rash of protests right across the country. There was also a scattering of little publicised, and usually quite short, strikes over wages and working conditions.
Without a firm hand from the centre holding everyone down, those bureaucrats running enterprises and local government felt that the only way to maintain their control over those beneath them was to give in to at least some of these pressures. Promises were made to grant greater national rights, to close down the most polluting factories, to increase wages, housing, education and health spending.
So while reform failed to increase the output of the economy, the amount of spending by government and enterprises shot up. In 1988 incomes rose by about 8.5 percent, industrial output by only 3.5 percent. A meeting of the council of ministers early in 1989 was told:
“Over the three years of the plan budget spending exceeded income by 184,000 million roubles. The money supply has reached critical dimensions, the volume doubled in comparison with the previous year, and exceeded by four times the average figure for the 11th five year plan... There has been a growth in the balance of payments deficit. .. “
Such a sudden intensification of the economic crisis produced confusion among the ranks of those committed to reform. On the one hand, there is pressure from the very many conservative minded bureaucrats in government and industry to return to the old methods of centralised control, using bullying from above to make managers in each enterprise produce the inputs needed by managers in other enterprises. The party leadership made a limited shift in this direction by imposing new price controls on many goods and banning the export of certain consumer goods.
On the other hand, there was pressure for increased reform from economists who claimed that only more competition between enterprises and, eventually, direct competition between firms inside
The leadership did not know which way to turn, for it could see immense problems with either approach. It knew that the system of centralised bullying had led to the 'pre-crisis' situation. But it also knew that to make a radical turn towards the market could devastate whole sections of industry. Even the more limited 'market' policy of allowing all prices to rise faced an immense obstacle: such price rises in
The replacement of old, inept and corrupt bureaucrats did not even lead to any fundamental change in the functioning of the bureaucracy as a whole. As Gorbachev himself complained:
Some 66 percent of our ministers, 61 percent of oblast party committee first secretaries and chairmen of oblast soviet executive committees, and 63 percent of town and rayon party committee first secretaries are new.. . But the past has left its mark on them. .. Their first concern is for a direct government telephone line, good premises, a car and so forth.. . Many people are pursuing their own selfish egoistic interests, but want to promote them in the convenient disguise of concern for the people and socialism.'"'
Eighteen months later nothing had changed. Gorbachev's own appointees stood up and criticised him at Central Committee meetings for not providing 'stability'. And in order to stop economic collapse, Ryzhkov introduced emergency measures for the next two years which gave the centre enormous control over enterprises' investment plans, pricing powers and foreign trade. The pro-market economists immediately denounced him for going back to 'vertical' and 'commandist' methods of economic direction.'"
Internal disintegration
When the elements who make up any great bureaucratic machine lose faith in their leaders they turn in on one another. As they do so, those they have dominated in the past begin, in a what is at first a confused and bewildered way, to push their own claims. This has been happening in the
It is a question over which the left internationally is often hopelessly confused. Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, has argued that 'all the other parts of the Russian Empire are generally better off than
This is to ignore the way Stalin systematically pushed through a policy of Russification of the non-Russian peoples as part of the process of consolidating the hold of the central, Russian speaking bureaucracy. He purged the minority nationalities from positions of power, so that in the late 1930s only 17 out of 1,310 officials in the northern
But nationalism did more than provide a means for people to protest at national oppression. It also served to heighten their feelings of alienation from those who ran the central state and the giant enterprises. The all-union institutions which dominate the country are overwhelmingly made up of Russians and, to a lesser extent, other Slavs. Only two members of the politburo are non-Russian. Russians make up just under half the population yet they are 59.7 percent of the party membership of 18 million. And non-Russians who want to make a career for themselves have to do so by adapting to the dominant nationality and accepting what, is for them, a foreign language.
What is more, conditions are on average worse in most of the republics—although not in the Baltic states—than in
Under such circumstances, it is very easy for people to see social problems as resulting from national discrimination. What is more, the existence of republic level 'ethnic' institutions provides an easy focus for agitation: a local demonstration might be able to pressurise a local republican Soviet or Central Committee into taking action in a way which was not possible with the central power in
It was precisely the coming together of national and social grievances that produced the most bitter expression of nationalism in
Izvestia reported that the Karabakh protests began as protests against catastrophic mismanagement and miserable economic conditions. Only later did it take a nationalist turn.. .
The newspaper said meat and butter have been rationed for a long time, even though it is a farming region. Half the peasant families have no cows, and a third have no animals at all... People in Stepanakert have had running water only one hour a day, because of insufficient supplies.. .2I"
A report in Moscow News described the living conditions of those who took part in the anti-Armenian riots in
There were 55 hostels in one small town. And they were the lucky ones, because others had to make do with shanty towns made out of old tin plates, cockleshells and defective concrete blocks next to plants belching smoke, soot and dust... If it had not been for laundry hanging on ropes and TV aerials sticking out of the ground we would never have guessed that people existed there...
A
“Many problems in the field of the language, history, culture and spiritual life of the people have for a long period of life been neglected. .. There was harsh criticism of some Soviet farms and organisations that artificially contract the field of the use of the Azeri language. The preparation of official papers in the Azeri language and the organisation of business correspondence is lax... The
The first protests in
The best comment on conditions in these republics is the figures on unemployment. Pravda has revealed that the most recent figures (for 1986!) show 27.6 percent unemployed in Azerbaijan and 18 percent in Armenia—and this was before the 'transition to financial autonomy' had caused three million people in the USSR as a whole to lose their jobs." Altogether there are six million young people without jobs in the central Asian republics and
It is hardly surprising that the national movements have grown larger and more radical as people in the poorer regions have lost any illusions that perestroika can improve their economic and social conditions. In the richer republics, the more intractable the problems of the
But nationalism has not just been a spontaneous expression of popular discontent. It has also provided a way for the local sections of the ruling bureaucracy to try and deflect critiscism away from themselves, onto other ethnic groups. At the time of the Sumgait pogrom early in 1988, reports in the Russian press suggested that local party leaders and police chiefs had deliberately encouraged people to attack the city's Armenian population; at the beginning of 1990 Western papers quoted leaders of the Azerbaijani Popular Front as claiming that it was local party officals, not themselves, who were urging attacks on Armenians—a claim which is accepted by the radical left in Moscow.20' In a republic where the problems of unemployment and appalling housing conditions were compounded by the arrival of 200,000 refugees, who could find neither homes nor jobs, it was all too easy to direct anger against the tens of thousands of Armenian workers and away from the privileges of the local bureaucracy.
Stalin had consolidated his power by a divide and rule policy which allowed the dominant nationality in each republic to oppress minority nationalities while itself suffering at the hands of the central Russian speaking bureaucracy. Now the awakening of the oppressed minorities easily takes the form of them directing their resentments against each other, as when Georgian nationalists fought to suppress Abkhazians while protesting against their own oppression by Moscow, or when Uzbeks launched pogroms against Mesketians who had been deported to Uzbekistan by Stalin.
It was not only in
The ability of the local bureaucracies to exploit nationalism for their own ends has led some people on the left to see this as the main factor at work.2" The end result of such an argument can be to oppose the right of self determination for the minority nationalities on the grounds that, 'if the Soviet Union were to fragment into its constituent nationalities it would create a situation far worse than that which currently exists... it would unleash a process of Balkanisation and confuse the class struggle',"9 or that the only outcome can be an endless bloodbath.21"
This argument is completely upside down. The local bureaucrats can exploit feelings of national disadvantage because these feelings exist. It was not the local republican rulers who intitiated the national movements in the
Responsibility for the danger of inter-communal bloodshed has to be placed on those whose actions over 60 years have encouraged national antagonisms—the central, mainly Russian speaking bureaucracy. If Armenians and Azerbaijanis turned on each other, it was because the ruling bureaucracy would not grant either ethnic group full national rights (including the right of
One thing stood out about Gorbachev's behaviour through all his twists and turns. For all his talk of 'democratisation' he saw trying to block the development of a secessionist movement in the industrially important Baku area as the most important single thing, reasoning that geography would always prevent secessionist talk among outraged Armenians from turning into action. This explains why for so long his repression was directed against the democratic demands of the majority in the Karabakh. It also explains why he redirected his bloody repression at Azerbaijanis the moment a real secessionist movement developed among them. The border posts with
Why perestroika is failing
Gorbachev's failures are not a product of personal deficiences. They have been inbuilt from the beginning into the task which he set himself.
Politically, perestroika rested on a contradiction. The biggest bureaucracy in the world had to be shaken up, and this could not happen without allowing pressure on it from outside its ranks. But that bureaucracy was still expected to impose the demands of the central government on the rest of the population. It is hardly surprising that Gorbachev upset both the ranks of the bureaucracy and those of the masses who began demonstrating, his picture in hand, two years earlier. He was following the pattern of East European reform governments of the 1950s and 1960s:
"The failure of the economy. . . results in a split in the apparatus. One section begins to demand wholesale reform. . . At a certain point the reforming bureaucracy calls in certain extra-bureaucratic layers (intellectuals, journalists, students) to help it paralyse the apparatus and let it take over. But this permits, even encourages, extra-bureaucratic classes (above all the workers) to mobilise, at first behind sections of the reforming bureaucracy, but increasingly on their own account. . .
"In any case the reforming section of the apparatus is forced to come to terms with its enemies, internal and external, and their methods if it is to avoid complete dissolution by the forces it itself has unleashed. It is forced to reimpose relations of production that, despite modification, are in contradiction to the maximal development of the national economy." [This was a quote from myself from a decade and a half earlier]
But the problems besetting Gorbachev—or anyone who might replace him—are worse in two ways than those which beset that East European precursors. First, they had at hand a powerful, external weapon if they chose the path of repression: the massive power of the
Second, the failure of economic reform has not just been a failure of implementation. There is a flaw in the very notion of the reform itself. The aim is to restructure the Soviet economy so that those sections of it capable of adjusting to the current international level of the forces of production expand, while others close down. But this is bound to be an enormously painful undertaking, not just for those workers who suffer in the process but for the mass of the individual members of the bureaucracy as well.
Restructuring the British economy between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s involved shutting down about one factory in three and destroying capital on such a scale that gross industrial investment in 1990 is still no higher than in 1972. It is very doubtful if it could have proceeded smoothly if British capitalism had not had the lucky bonus of enormous
The
The reformers in the
Marx once wrote that mankind only poses itself problems that it can solve. But that is not true of individual human beings or of exploiting classes. They are driven to attempt to achieve goals that they do not have the capacity to reach. This has been the case with Gorbachev and Russian state capitalism. The ruling bureaucracy can neither abandon economic reform nor make it succeed. That is why perestroika has changed from an inspiration to a joke for all classes inside the
Moving sideways in
It used to be said in the mid-1950s that when
The ruling parties in all these countries were parties of the managerial bureaucracy. Only 6 percent of Prague workers were party members in 1970, and three years later only one party member in eight was in manual employment.'12 A sociological study in the late 1960s concluded that 'members of the party are mainly officials or belong to independent professions.'
Even where sections of the cultural intelligentsia were oppositional, what was sometimes called the 'technical intelligentsia' which ran the apparatus of the party, the state and the enterprises was deeply conservative.214 Its conservativism was a key factor in allowing the old ruling parties to re-establish their hold after the trauma of 1956. This was also to be the case in
Yet all the time the needs of capital accumulation were pushing its individual members in the enterprises and the governments of
“Big, monopolistic firms began to use their newly achieved power to dictate plans to the central planners.., For more than two decades Czechoslovakia experienced a mere 'playing at planning'"
The Eastern European businessmen did not care too much about ideology, providing they could run their enterprises successfully, accumulating capital to protect their own very substantial privileges. They would hold party cards because party membership helped them to succeed—and because the party helped stamp out dissent among the workforce. But they did not take the party's avowed beliefs seriously. The Slovak former dissident, Simecka, has told how that even before 1968 it was possible to find inside the Czechoslovak Party 'committed anti-communists, the enthusiastic admirers of Western consumer society'.
In this way the ground was slowly laid for a sudden switch in the loyalties of key cadres in the ruling party and the government bureaucracy the moment society entered into a deep political crisis. Not that top managers ever went into opposition. There is not, to my knowledge, a single instance of that anywhere in Eastern Europe or the
But there was a small section of the intelligentsia whose function it was to worry about the long term economic and social trends—the regime's academic, economic and sociological advisers. In the 1950s and 1960s these had accepted the regime's own models of economic development. While the world wide trend was still to varying degrees of state capitalism, all the economic advisers took 'planning' and state ownership for granted. The more far sighted saw that the existing structure was prone to various sorts of crises (particularly repeated crisis due to over-accumulation and the investment cycle) and waste. Their solution was to reform the command economy, to opt for 'reform communism', and not to dash in the direction of a Western capitalism which itself was increasingly using the language of 'planning'.
Over time attitudes began to shift. Groups of economists emerged who gave a theoretical expression to the new trends emerging in the world system. They saw that what mattered for a successful ruling class was its ability to swap state capitalism for multinational competition. Their theory turned to worship of the untrammelled market. From the Stalinist model of society they moved on to what they called 'market socialism'. Soon they insisted that the 'socialism' (ie state control of any sort) was itself an impediment.
The economic advisers could not determine how the ruling class would behave. But they could present it with options which would enable it to cope when an economic and social crisis actually erupted. The Hungarian establishment economists were all thorough going proponents of 'market socialism' from the mid-1960s onwards. The crisis of the late 1970s pushed Polish economists, who had previously included such notable adherents of planning as Kalecki and Lange, in the same direction. Even
So it was that it required very little outside pressure for the edifice of East European 'communism' to collapse. The old people at the top, the Kadars, the Honeckers, the Jakes, people whose whole lives had been dedicated to the old methods of accumulation based on nationally enclosed command economies, ranted and raved about betrayal and even on occasions fantasised about telling their police to open fire. But key structures below them were already run by people who, at least privately, accepted the new multinational capitalist common sense emanating from the economists. All that was required was the prospect of economic crisis combined with various degrees of peaceful mass protest for hastily convened Central Committees to remove the old guard—and for regional and national party meetings then to remove the Central Committee members.
The active, courageous initiative of students, intellectuals and, above all, workers, who risked the vengeance of the police by taking to the streets, precipitated a passive and cowardly, but decisive, revolt of a ruling class against its old ruling party. This made the mass of people feel they had won everything, and very easily. But the central power of the ruling class was untouched.
A ruling class and a ruling party are never quite the same thing. A ruling party represents a ruling class, binding its members together in a common discipline which helps them achieve their common goals against the rest of society. But the class can preserve the real source of its power and privileges, its control over the means of production, even when the party falls apart. This was shown in
In
Multinational capitalism and the East European oppositions
The smooth transition from one form of capitalist rule to another never depends solely upon the attitude of the ruling class. There is only pressure for the transition because the crisis of the old forms of rule is creating enormous popular discontent. Yet the transition itself involves disruption to the mechanisms which have kept the discontent in check in the past— the political and ideological apparatuses of the ruling class. The greater the level of accumulation and the levels of repression needed to sustain it, the greater the possibility of the mass of people taking advantage of this disruption to give expression to accumulated bitterness in a huge explosion of anger and action which throws into disarray all the schemes of the ruling class reformers. That is why at decisive moments they hope to get the backing of sections of the very opposition they previously persecuted. For only the oppositionists have the popular prestige to control the masses and ensure the transition is a smooth one.
A leading member of the old ruling party in
The Solidarity government will have to close down some big enterprises where its own organisations are strong. This will produce sharp protests from the workers. We tried to do this several times ourselves, but put it aside every time fearing the response. Masowiecki will have to cope with this problem. The situation in the economy may become worse, extremist elements will surface, riots will start, the country will become paralysed and violence will be the only way out. . . A situation is possible in which prime minister Mazowiecki would ask general Jaruzelski to introduce martial law."1
The Russian pro-market reformer, Klyamkin, argues continued authoritarian rule is still necessary precisely because there do not exist alternative structures capable of controlling an explosion from below: 'We do not have a so called civil society, that is a society separate from the state.. .and therefore nowhere to transfer power to.'21" In other words, it is not good enough for the ruling class to be permeated with people committed to the new form of capitalist rule; the masses must also be permeated by 'informal', oppositional structures committed to the same goals. The ideology that has conquered the state capitalist ruling class must also conquer those who have been its most bitter enemies. Hence the changes in the dominant ideas inside the oppositional groupings in the Eastern states between the 1960s and the 1980s.
In the revolts of the mid-1950s the opposition forces were led by people who talked in terms of some sort of alternative 'socialist' model of society to the Stalinist one. In the Hungarian revolution almost no one called for a restoration of the pre-war state of affairs or for an imitation of Western property forms. Those forces grouped round the government of Imre Nagy stood for a reformed version of the existing system; the more radical street fighters and workers council delegates distrusted this model. They demanded direct democratic control over the state and the enterprises. They did not talk about private property (except on the land, through a division of the 'collectives' among the toilers). In the Polish 'October' of 1956, the supporters of both the new Gomulka government and of the 'left' opposition to it, centred round the publication Po Prostu, stood for 'reformed communism'. Even at late as 1968 the most radical opponents of neo-Stalinism in
The only viable alternative to the existing state capitalisms seemed to be societies in which planning and state ownership of the main means of production were combined with some radical form of democracy. The arguments within the oppositions were over the degree of radical democracy, over whether workers' councils should advise or control, operate alongside the existing state or seek to supplant it.
This changed in the course of the 1970s. In Poland Kuron and Modzelewski, after two long spells in prison and a period of enforced inactivity, returned to oppositional politics but abjured their previous revolutionary positions in favour of a 'self limiting' revolution; Adam Michnik wrote a long study, The Left and the Church, which argued for a dropping of old left-right arguments in favour of a common platform of defence of civil rights."" In Hungary a 'new left', which placed itself in the Marxist tradition, was central to the re-emergence of open dissent in the early 1970s, but a few years later most of them broke decisively from a socialist perspective and today seem mainly to be found in the Free Democrat Party, which sees an untrammelled market economy as the only one compatible with liberal democratic values. In Czechoslovakia, individual revolutionary socialists like Petr Uhl continued to play a prominent part in the oppositional movement right up the collapse of one-party rule, but the shift of the general attitude of the opposition is well summed up by Vaclav Havel, who says that he ceased to regard 'socialism' as a meaningful term in the mid-1970s.
The opposition would justify their ideological shift by pointing to the horrors of Stalinism as proving the dangers of 'Utopian' programmes’ or the need to take account of geo-political realities (ie Russian power) . But neither argument really explains the change. The horrors of Stalinism were well known in
Here was a prospect for political change which would not involve all the dangers of violent confrontation, in which a very limited exercise of mass pressure could combine with negotiations to prise apart the old one party structures.
Such an approach was pioneered in intellectual circles in
“The experts on both sides... were more or less members of the same
As the country's crisis worsened in the course of 1981, Solidarnosc's most influential leader, Lech Walesa, endorsed the idea of collaboration with the old rulers' 'reforms'. But key figures in the ruling class understood that the union's membership were too bitter and too confident to swallow the cost to themselves of the economic aspect of such an agreement. In December 1981 they resorted to a military takeover to break the union's power. But the military takeover could not bring the economic crisis to an end, and by 1987 both within the regime and within the opposition there were important forces pushing for an 'anti-crisis pact'. On the regime's side pragmatic adjustment away from state capitalism towards 'multinational market capitalism' had gone so far that the minister of industry was a former nomenklatura manager who had turned himself into a successful private entrepreneur. On Solidarnosc's side a union leadership which had lost confidence in the likelihood of the workers who had once been members of the union fighting again were prepared to look seriously at such a deal and welcomed as advisers economists who preached a completely Westernised economy.
Most members of the oppositions did not think things through in so open or cynical a manner. Among the approximately 200 hardened dissidents in each country, most were motivated by a deep hatred of the repressive one-party system and simply wanted the easiest alternative to it. And the economics of 'the market', of pushing nomenklatura capitalism to transform itself into an adjunct of multinational capitalism, seemed to promise this. A Western journalist, Timothy Garton Ash, was present at the daily organising meetings of the Czech Civic Forum in the second half of November 1989. He tells how the decisions on economic policy were made:
“Most of those present have been active in opposition before, the biggest single group being signatories of Charter 77. Twenty years ago they were journalists, academics, politicians, lawyers but now they come here from their jobs as stokers, window cleaners, clerks, or, at best, banned writers.. . A few have come straight from prison.. . Politically they range from the neo-Trotskyist Petr Uhl to the deeply conservative Catholic Vaclav Bena. ..
“In addition there are representatives of significant groups. They are The Students... The Actors... Then there are The Workers, mainly represented by Petr Miller, a technician from
“The Prognostics are in fact economists. Their particular mystique comes from knowing, or believing they know, or are least, being believed to know, what to do about the economy—a subject clearly high in the minds of the people on the streets, and one in which most of the philosophers, poets, actors, historians, assembled here have slightly less expertise than the ordinary workers on the Vysocany tram. . . Dr Vacklav Klaus, as arrogant as he is clear, favours the solutions of Milton Friedman. His more modest colleague, Dr Tomas Jezek, by contrast, is a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek. . .
“It was not long before one of the economists was making what people saw as a bid for the premiership at a mass meeting in Wenceslas Square:
“A student reads out a letter from the students asking the president to replace Adamec with Komarek. 'Pan Docent Komarek, Dr Sc,' she says, 'has a programme ready '—so to everyone standing in the square it is clear that the Forum has just proposed a candidate for prime minister. Go to the Magic Lantern, however, and you discover than the Forum didn't mean that at all”
The interesting thing about this incident is that all this occurred without anyone remarking that Komarek was a long time member of the ruling party—something virtually impossible in
In a similar way, extreme 'free market' advisers to Solidarnosc occupy the economic ministries in Warsaw, taking advice from the American economist Jeffrey Sachs—and leaving the social democrat inclined Kuron the ministry of labour, from which he tries to stop worker resistance to the effects of such policies.
In
Prospects for the nineties
There is euphoria whenever a mass oppositional movement achieves its initial goals. The less the bloodshed involved in the victory, the greater the euphoria. So it was in
The euphoria rarely lasts. The ease of the victory is a result of a temporary coincidence of goals between the mass of the exploited classes and a section of the exploiting class. Adherents of reform within the old regime stopped the troops from opening fire at a vital moment and so ensured bloodless change. But the reform they want takes for granted a continuation of the old methods of exploitation, while the mass of people want, as a minimum, an amelioration of those methods. The general euphoria of the first revolutionary days gives way to bitter dispute and deep disillusionment.
The bitterness and disillusionment are, at first, deepest among those who took the greatest risks in opposing the old order. They find that those who were the last to jump onto the revolutionary bandwagon have taken control of its steering wheel, while they themselves are forced back to the margins of political life. In
It is all too easy in such a situation for the old oppositional activists to feel betrayed, not merely by the late comers to the revolution, but by the mass of people. Already you hear Polish and East German activists bemoaning what they see as the great lost opportunity to carry through a real revolution, as if the period of social and political turmoil has come to an end. Such feelings can lead in two equally futile directions, towards a demoralised withdrawal from activity or towards heroic attempts to take on the new order with deeds which do not have mass support.
What is forgotten, in either case, is that the ruling class still faces immense problems of its own. It has governments intent on making the transition from state capitalism to multinational capitalism, but such a transition is far from easy. The period of transition is likely to be one of repeated economic and social confrontations, although the seriousness of these will vary from country to country.
There are economic problems to be confronted similar to those which have beset Gorbachev's economic reforms in the
The economists in the new governments look to Western investment to help them. But this, so far, has been on quite a small scale, despite the great publicity given to promises by the European Community and the Japanese premier. As the Financial Times recently noted:
“Western businessmen caution against an East European assumption that money will flood in as soon as the door is opened. Despite wage levels a third of those prevailing in the West or even less, East bloc countries still have to compete with other parts of the world for investment. According to an executive of one West German multinational, it is not easy to persuade board members of the merits of the East European case.
The result is that the overall pot of available investment is still likely to remain small. A relatively small number of high profile, big ticket deals such as the recent £150 million purchase by General Electric of Hungary's Tungsram cannot mask the fact that most Western investments in the East bloc involve only small amounts of capital.
“Western investors are not convinced that the period of political instability is over, and fear that factories they finance in Eastern Europe may have difficulties selling the goods they produce in the West—exactly what happened to the great investments in Poland in the 1970s."'
Even the low wages are not always as a big an attraction as they might seem. There are other places in the world with even lower wages. And what is more, the buying power of the wage packets might be low in terms of consumer durables and electronic goods, but it is not nearly so low when it comes to basic items like food, accommodation, heating and fuel. Part of opening up to the world market involves raising these prices towards international levels. But that in turn can lead workers to use their freedom from one-party domination to insist on wage rises.
Lech Walesa may tell American businessmen they can employ Polish workers for ten dollars a week, but that is because the dollar will buy about ten times as much basic foodstuffs and services in Warsaw as in New York—a state of affairs the Polish economic ministers intend to change quickly.
The economic problems involved in the transition are general to all the East European countries. But they are much more acute in some than in others. Past indebtedness is a huge burden for the ruling classes of
When one party rule collapsed
Such transfers, although not high, would inevitably strain West German finances. [There would be the danger] of serious social and budgetary risks for both
Even the West German finance minister believes 'the introduction of the Deutsche Mark into
Some of those who now run economic ministries in Czechoslovakia claim that the country's problems are not nearly as severe as in, say, Poland, and that restructuring is compatible with maintaining full employment and a full welfare system. Another prominent reformer, by contrast, says that
The pygmy state capitalisms of
Regardless of the situation in individual countries, one thing stands out in any objective examination of reality: the gap between what the great mass of workers expect from the changes and what they are actually likely to get. The East European countries border on the most prosperous of the West European states and people have come to equate the Western form of capitalism with Scandinavian or West German living standards. But such living standards are just not on the cards. A clash is inevitable, at some point, between raised expectations and harsh reality.
The East European economists preach that the market is the magical solution to all problems, that the era of multinational capitalism is one of unlimited and ever widening economic expansion, bringing prosperity—although in different degrees—to all classes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The competition of giant firms on a world scale leads them to build in certain sectors of national economies and leave others to fester. It leads them to periodic bouts of restructuring, suddenly shutting plants, discarding workforces and devastating whole regions. It leads them to engage in frenetic bouts of competitive accumulation (booms) as they scour the world for raw materials and skilled labour, followed by sudden spells of stagnation (recessions), during which the most modern plants stand idle and immense construction projects are left unfinished. It leads them to apply to industrial societies the methods of shifting agriculture, cutting and burning old working class communities in the endless search for more profitable locations.
All this can create untold difficulties for the new political leaders of
The country where the objective problems in making the transition from state capitalism to multinational capitalism are greatest is the
The economic dilemma is summed up by a debate which has been taking place for the last year over plans for the building of a new petrochemical complex in
The deepening crisis in the production and availability of consumer goods in the Soviet Union has prompted a group of senior Soviet scientists to call for the scrapping of one of the country's biggest investments—the construction over the next decade of five petrochemical projects in the oilfields of Western Siberia, planned as joint ventures with US, Japanese, West German and Italian companies.
The scientists claim the project will cost double the projected 41 billion roubles investment. . . when on stream, [it will] force down the world price of plastics and polymers. .. Above all they claim that the investment will starve the rest of the chemical industry of much needed funds, inhibit the adoption of energy saving strategies and exclude any possibility of reorienting the economy to social needs."
The interesting point is that the logic of the chemical project is not that of the old, self contained national state capitalism, but of trying to build up production linked to multinational capitalism. The result, the critics are saying, will be a huge investment that distorts the rest of the internal economy of the USSR, pushes other sectors of production backwards, disrupts the links between different industries and causes further downward pressures on living standards—all without any guarantee that changes elsewhere in the world economy will not cause it to operate at a loss.
The political dilemma is shown by the way in which the old party structure and the new parliamentary structures of the Congress of Deputies and the Soviet co-exist, without either being able to cope. The old party structure is still the main co-ordinating centre for those who run the enterprises, the armed forces, the police and KGB, and local and national government. A survey in Brezhnev's time showed 40 percent of top party apparatchiks were former industrial managers and another 25 percent former agricultural bosses, as against only 12 percent who had risen from the ranks of the party bureaucracy alone."' The 'conservative' party chiefs are not dinosaurs, cut off from the reality of managerial life, but representative of those who run the great enterprises. Their conservatism is that of a class whose members are much more dependent upon their links with each other than with Western corporations. They therefore do not, as in much of
The Congress of Deputies and the Soviets have a greater hold on the allegiance of the mass of people than does the party. But they are in no condition to replace it as a centre for co-ordinating the actions of the different sections of the ruling bureaucracy. Hence the contrast between the
This is producing a strange series of ideological divergences among the reformers. The best known of the radical democratic leaders—like those grouped around Yeltsin in the Congress of Deputies—identify with the market and democracy. But some of the extreme marketeers are now coming to the conclusion that authoritarian rule is needed.
This view was put clearly by A Migranyan and I Klyamkin of the Institute of the World Socialist System late last year. Migranyan argues, 'It would have been better if our leader [Gorbachev] had strengthened his hand in an administrative way, as took place in
What if a reformer declares himself in favour of introducing the market ? Can this be done by relying on the market? Obviously not, since 80 percent of the population would not accept it. The market, after all, denotes stratification, differentiation according to income... Therefore a serious reformer cannot rely on the masses for success.''"'
Boris Kagarlitsky had called this 'market Stalinism'.2" But the ideological guise taken by new attempts at authoritarian solutions is unlikely to be an outright Stalinist one. The reaction against the old order is too great. There are, in any case, many other ways in which authoritarian restructurers can try to build a base for themselves. The past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living, and the past contains a mass of prejudices of which unscrupulous political forces will attempt to take advantage—anti-Turk feeling in Bulgaria, anti-Magyar feeling in Romania, anti-'gypsy' feeling in Hungary, Great Russian chauvinism in the USSR, anti-semitism almost everywhere. New political combinations might well emerge, preaching a message that is anti-Communist, but also authoritarian, and prepared to work with the remnants of the old security forces to impose 'order'.
The building of socialist oppositions
Throughout the Eastern states the popular identification of Stalinism and socialism has made it very difficult for genuine socialists to receive a hearing. Workers who have seen the red flag flying over a concentration camp do not automatically wave it with joy. What is more, the socialist oppositions usually suffered much more under the old one party states than did liberal forces receiving some degree of aid and protection from the West. And so, although groups of genuine socialists exist, their numbers and influence remain small for the moment.
Yet resistance to the grafting together of state capitalism and multinational capitalism is inevitable everywhere. It will come from three main sources. First, there will be resistance from many of the radical democrats who have born the brunt of the challenge to the old one-party regimes. They will not be happy to see people who gained their positions through the nomenklatura retain them simply by dropping one ideological guise for another. They will continue to demand the disbanding of the political police and they will not be happy to see the old party structures which controlled the media give way to new structures in which old party nominees join up with multinational capital to exercise just as tight a control."" It will not take long for those influenced by pacifism and green ideas to discover that the new form of capitalism will be determined to hang on to the old armies and to pollute the environment in the interests of profit.
In
Things are more complicated in the
Second, there will often be a nationalist reaction among minority ethnic groups to the new form of capitalism. The coming together of state capital and multinational capital can only exacerbate the unevenness of economic development within each country. Effective multinational competitiveness involves a concentration of production in certain geographic regions— usually those that are already most advanced or closest to foreign production facilities and markets—at the expense of others. The result can be seen in the Eastern state which has been most open to multinational links,
The result, inevitably, will be to create strong feelings of national disadvantage among those in the areas that fall further behind. There can be wide disillusionment with the market among the masses of the population; there can also be attempts by local sections of the ruling class and the intelligentsia to use these feelings to advance their own position. As with the wave of nationalism current today in both the
The third, and potentially most important, resistance will come from the workers.
The most important strikes were those in the
It would be wrong to think that the strikers immediately came to a clear, class conscious perspective. Many saw miners as somehow different and better than other workers. An early demand which received a lot of support in the Kuzbass was for financial autonomy for individual pits or individual mining regions, so that they could use the profits directly to improve wages and conditions—a demand which attempted to challenge their exploitation but which could also, in part, be directed against workers in less profitable enterprises and miners in the older and less efficient mines of the Donbass.
Boris Kagarlitsky, who sat in on some strike committee meetings in
“You mustn 't exaggerate the level of class consciousness of the working class. We 're only going through the first steps of the working class movement. Sometimes miners were quite sectional, in the sense that strike committees rejected solidarity from other groups of workers, for example. But on the other hand it was quite impressive how people learnt.
“One of the most important things is that now miners, after going on strike, are beginning to realise that they are very strong. That will make them less and less moderate, more and more able to use their strength politically, economically and socially.
“That is a great change. For many years working class people were not able to achieve anything. Now they can achieve things, while Gorbachev and the leadership cannot achieve anything.'"
The strikers eventually went back to work in return for promises from Gorbachev and Ryzhkov which were not met. When miners in
“This is perhaps the worst ordeal to befall our country in all four years of restructuring. There has been
It is the inevitability of such workers' struggles that provides the greatest hope for socialists in the Eastern states. Not that the workers will initially start off with socialist ideas. Many will identify initially with the radical democrats (and with nationalist movements among the national minorities); a few might even fall for the demagoguery of the party conservatives (although this is a danger much exaggerated by the reform minded intelligentsia). Their hatred of the old order will often make them distrustful of those who call themselves socialists.
Yet the attempts of the radical democrats to build organised support among workers will continually be damaged by their own commitment to linking state capital to multinational capital through the market. This leads the radical democrats to accept that there must be huge inequalities between those who run enterprises and those who work in them; their only objection to the old inequalities is that they have come from nomenklatura connections, not the market. It also means that they do not believe the resources exist to improve workers' material conditions,'4" and so are hesitant to support strikes over such questions, saying that workers should be struggling just for political demands. Their approach to workers' problems is to begin by saying that workers must work harder (often accepting the myth of the middle classes everywhere in the world that 'our workers do not know how to work'), and that this will eventually lead to a rise in living standards.
So it was that the Solidarnosc advisers were opposed to strikes before as well as after the formation of the coalition government in
The gap between the radical democrats and the workers' struggles is brought out most vividly in the case of the
Strikes over economic issues also cause special problems for those who endeavour to channel people's frustrations in purely nationalist directions. The workforces of large enterprises are almost invariably of mixed nationality,"' and workers' struggles can unite them around strike committees which cut across ethnic divisions, raising the prospect of a genuine internationalism which takes account of the rights of national minorities.
However, before socialists in the Eastern states can take advantage of the factors in the situation which favour them, they themselves have to be clear about certain important points.
First, they have to grasp that the transition from state capitalism to multinational capitalism is neither a step forward nor a step backwards, but a step sidewards. The change involves only a shift from one form of exploitation to another form for the working class as a whole, even if some individual groups of workers (skilled workers in expanding industries) find themselves better placed to improve their conditions and others (those in industries subject to 'rationalisation') find their conditions worsened.
Unfortunately, there are still socialists in the Eastern states who have not fully grasped this. Some mistakenly identify the Western form of capitalism with 'consumerism' and 'democracy' (as if either term applied in the vast mass of 'free market' capitalisms of the 'third world' and the newly industrialising countries!) and so see the market as something to be embraced, albeit with reservations. Others see the nationalisation of industry as something to be defended in its own right and the main task as being to resist the selling of 'national property' to Western multinationals'—or, in the case of
But state capitalism did not come into being because of workers' struggles. It corresponded to the needs of accumulation in a certain phase of capitalist development which has now exhausted itself. Nor does the new turn to multinational capitalism have anything to do with democracy or consumers' needs; it takes place because there is no other way the state capitalist nomenklatura can sustain itself against international competition. The task of socialists is not to defend one phase of accumulation against another, but to take advantage of the political and social instability produced by the attempt to shift from one to another to press our own revolutionary demands.
Concretely, that means supporting every struggle by workers, intellectuals, students or oppressed nationalities against the old state capitalist order, while at the same time resisting the attempts to take over these struggles by those who want to transplant multinational capitalism into state capitalism.
It also means resisting the rationalisation imposed by the new forces of multinational capitalism, without falling into the trap of forming alliances with the old state capitalists. These will try to lure workers into dropping demands over wages and conditions inside nationalised industries and to collaborate in pushing up productivity, claiming this is the way to ward off the 'danger of privatisation' or of the country becoming a 'neo-colony'. If workers fall for this, they will merely be permitting intensified exploitation in order.. .to prevent intensified exploitation. It is worth remembering the experience of restructuring in the last 16 years in Britain: top managers in British Airways, British Aerospace, British Steel, British shipbuilding and Austin Rover all urged workers to 'participate in making nationalisation work'; it was only after pushing through massive closure and redundancy programmes on this basis that they then made very large sums for themselves out of privatisation. And, in
Part of taking advantage of the political crisis of the transition is pushing to the limit the democratic demands of the radical democrats: not restricting them just to the question of free elections, but also raising the question of free trade unions, of the unimpeded right to strike and to demonstrate, of the complete disbanding of the repressive forces (political police, security police, secret services), of the purging from the organs of the state and from enterprise managements all those who collaborated with these in the past, of control over the media by those who work in them and not by government, nomenklatura or big business appointees. It means turning the democratic struggles against state capitalism into democratic struggles against multinational capitalism— and, in the process, winning some of the best sections of the radical democrats to see multinational capital as an enemy.
Linked to this is the question of the character of the state. Many socialists in
Only if the character of the state is understood, can a correct understanding of the national question be arrived at. Socialists who identify in one way or another with the existing state end up, necessarily, seeing demands of minority nationalities to break from that state as leading to 'division within the working class'. Socialists who want to smash the existing state as a class state, by contrast, are indifferent as to whether it remains as a single capitalist state or breaks into two capitalist states. We do not worship a Russian national state called the
But we recognise that if a national minority feels oppressed, there is only one way to get its workers to identify with the struggle of workers in the majority nationality. The majority workers, or at least the conscious socialists among them, have to make it clear they do not want to continue that oppression. They have to stand by the right of the national minority to form its own state if it wants to, regardless of the form of state the minority chooses to establish.
The minority nationality may well be under the influence of petty bourgeois (or petty bureaucratic) leaders who are attempting to lead it into a blind alley. But the only way workers among the minority nationality will break from this leadership is if they see a socialist workers' movement among the majority nationality 'which is prepared to fight, in a more effective way than these leaders, against the reality of national oppression.
The reform governments and the radical democrats in the Eastern states believe the transition from the moribund state capitalist form of exploitation to the multinational capitalist form will be accompanied by social stability and widespread prosperity. They are wrong. The first step in overcoming the resistance of the old one-party apparatus to the transition may have been taken in a number of East European states, but that still leaves a long period of economic adjustment and, therefore, social and political adjustment. There is no guarantee that even before that period is over there will not be a new spate of capitalist restructuring on a world scale, and new pressures leading to economic, social and political turmoil.
Meanwhile, in the
Parties which eulogise the 'free market', multinational form of capitalism already exist openly throughout Eastern Europe and semi-openly in the
Notes
1 Financial Times, 24 January 1990.
2 Yeltsin quoted in Financial Times, 19 January 1990.
3 Independent on Sunday, 4 February 1990.
4 As
5 Quoted in Guardian, 13 January 1990.
6 Morning Star, \ 9 January 1990.
7 'Themes', New Left Review 178, November-December 1989. Rumour has it that Perry Anderson, the intellectually most eminent member of the editorial board, is deeply gloomy at what he sees as a world wide shift to the right.
8 First presented in a coherent form by Tony Cliff in The Nature of Stalinist Russia (
9 Z Medvedev, Gorbachev (
10 For an account of Andropov's role by the
11 J Bloomfield, ed. The Soviet Revolution (
12 T Ali, Revolution From Above (
13 Report in Labour Focus on
14 Interview in
15 Independent, 30 June 1988.
86
16 Speech to Congress of Delegates, 26 May 1989.
17 Transcript of broadcast in BBC monitoring service reports, May 1979.
18 Report from Boris Kagarlitsky in Socialist Worker, 29 May 1989.
19 See transcripts of interviews with editor of Argumenty i facty in BBC monitoring reports, 8 December 1989.
20 Report by Helen Womack, Independent, 9 February 1990.
21 Pravda, 6 February 1989.
22 Central Committee plenum of 18 July 1989, transcript translated in BBC monitoring reports, 24 July 1989.
23 Supreme Soviet, 2-3 October 1989. Interestingly, the Soviet's debate on the issue was not televised, see Moscow News, 22 October 1989.
24 Pravda, 21 October 1989.
25 Congress of Deputies, 13 December 1989, see also 15 and 16 December. Transcript to be found in BBC monitoring reports December 1989.
26 Transcript of speech in BBC monitoring report, 20 December 1989.
27 On page 119 of his book, Perestroika.
28 So Tariq Ali's book. Revolution From Above, written early in 1988, does not deal with the national question until the last 15 pages—which gives the impression of having been tacked on to end after the sudden upsurge of nationalism in Armenia. Tariq describes 'the break up of the
29 See, for example, the discussion on these questions in all editions of Tony Cliff's State Capitalism in Russia, op cit, and in my own 'Prospects for the 70s: The Stalinist States', in 42 (old series) February/March 1970.
30 These claims were, for instance, printed without critical comment by the Guardian's Martin Walker. See the issues of the Guardian for the third week of December 1986.
31 See G i Libaridian, The Karabagh File (Cambridge Mass, 1988).
32 TASS report, quoted in Independent, 5 March 1988.
33 Quoted in Independent, 3 April 1988.
34 Independent, 16 July 1988.
35 Le Monde, 26 July 1988.
36 Quoted Times, 3 September 1988.
37 TASS, 16 December 1988.
38 Pravda, 16 December 1988.
39 There are full reports on the proceedings of the founding Congresses in the BBC monitoring reports for October 1988.
40 Gorbachev, speech to Central Committee of CPSU, 25 December, op cit.
41
42 TASS, 25 October 1989.
43 Pravda, 2 October 1989.
44 hvestia, 5 February 1990.
45 Soviet TV, 19 January 1990, in BBC monitoring report, 22 January 1990.
46 Kiev Radio, 15 January 1990, quoted in BBC monitoring reports, 17 January 1990.
47 TASS, 1 February 1990.
48 hvestia, 2 February 1990.
49 Komsomolskaya Pravda, 11 January 1990.
50 N Mikhailov, Moskovksaya Pravda, 18 August 1989.
51 D Granin,
52 Soviet TV, 19 January 1990, in BBC monitoring report, 27 January 1990.
53 I was present as an observer at a congress of the Moscow Popular Front chaired by a soldier in uniform.
54 Krasnaya Zvezda, 3 November 1989.
55 Yerevan Radio, 29 September 1989, in BBC transcripts, 3 October 1989.
56 A Gelman, in
57 For full accounts of the strikes, based on discussions with Polish socialists who were active in them, see Socialist Worker, 27 August 1988, 3 September 1988, 10 September 1988.
58 I owe this figure to a member of the Polish Socialist Party (Democratic Revolution) from
59 The then dissident Miklos Haraszti told Socialist Worker Review (July 1988) that 10,000 took part in the demonstration of 15 March 1988.
60 Article in Sunday Correspondent, 17 September 1989.
61 For an account of their preparations see Stern, 25 January 1990.
62 Financial Times, 15 January 1990.
63 Financial Times, 15 January 1990.
64 Independent, 2 February 1990.
65 Financial Times, 15 January 1990.
66 Interview in
67 Ibid.
68 An eyewitness report of the demonstration to mark the 21 st anniversary of the Russian invasion estimated there were 7,000-8,000 people present, see Socialist Worker, 26 August 1989.
69 See, for example, 'Czech protestors fail to involve silent majority', Financial Times, 30 October 1989.
70 Interview in
71 Ibid.
72 Interview in Independent, 31 January 1990. See also the report that the state security system had been both 'abolished' and 'reorganised', Prague Radio, 1 February 1990, in BBC monitoring report, 3 February 1990.
73 For an account of what happened in politburo and Central Committee, see Moscow News, 7 January 1990.
74 For the new leadership's account of the economic crisis, see article from Trud, 1 December 1990, translated BBC transcripts, 14 December 1989.
75 For accounts of what occurred see BBC monitoring service for
76 There were no Western journalists in the country at the time and there are various contradictory reports in the Western media of what exactly happened. I am relying here mainly on the testimony of a Romanian who used his video camera to film the events of 21 -22 December, as recounted in a BBC Panorama programme of 8 January 1990.
77 New Left Review 50 (1967).
78 Quatrieme International, annee 14 (1956), nos 1-3.
79 E Mandel, La crise, 1978, ppl61-5.
80 Trotsky, 771c Class Nature of the
81 Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism (New York, 1973), p 14.
82 'The War and the Fourth International', in Writings 1939-40 (New York, 1973).
83 E Mandel, Beyond Perestroika (
84 T Ali, Revolution From Above, p80.
85 B Rizzi, The Bureaucratisation of the World (
86 M Schachtman, The New International, October 1941, p238, and Workers Party, Historic Documents Bulletin I, 1944, both quoted in R Dunayevskaya, State Capitalism and Marx's Humanism or Philosophy and Revolution (
87 M Rakovski, Towards an East European Marxism (
88 Ibid, plOl.
89 G Bence and J Kis, 'After the break', translated in F Silnitsky, L Silnitsky and
Karl R Reyman, Communism and
90 M Schachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution.
91 'Towards a political economy of the
92 In debate with Alex Callinicos at the Socialist Workers Party annual school, Marxism, in 1981.
93 In The Soviet Union Demystified (
94 F Furedi, ibid, plOO.
95 Ibid, pl02.
96 Ibid, pi 17.
97 Ibid, pl72.
98 Ibid, pl59.
99 Ibid, p67.
100 CIA Directorate of Intelligence, Revisiting Soviet Economic Performance Under Glasnost: Implications for CIA Estimates (
101 Someone should remind Ticktin of the ditty from 1958, 'Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, send it to the
102 Economist, 9 April 1988.
103 M Walker, 'What is to be done?', Marxism Today, June 1988, reprinted in J Bloomfield, ed, The Soviet Revolution, op cit, p97.
104 CIA, op cit.
105 'Introduction', in M C Kaser, ed, An Economic History of Eastern Europe, vol 1 (
106 Ibid.
107 Estimates quoted by Kaser, ibid, p9.
108 Ibid.
109 T Cliff, Slate Capitalism in
110 T Cliff, The Class Nature of the Peoples Democracies (London, 1950) reprinted in Neither Washington nor Moscow (London, 1982), Y Gluckstein (T Cliff), Stalin's Satellites in Europe (London, 1952) and Chris Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe (London, 1989, previous edition titled Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, London, 1974).
111 Y Gluckstein (T Cliff), Mao's
112 T Cliff, 'Deflected Permanent Revolution', in Neither Washington Nor Moscow, op cit.
113 For Trotsky it was what happened in the sphere of consumption that produced a division between a 'ruling caste' and the mass of workers. For Mandel 'the Soviet bureaucracy. . is under no economic compulsion to maximise output. . .' The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism (
114 Mandel contradicts his own claim that the bureaucracy is under no compulsion to maximise output by claiming that 'the inner logic of a planned economy calls for maximising output and optimising deployment of resources', and furthermore argues that accumulation occurred in societies before capitalism and will occur under socialism (Mandel, ibid). Ticktin sees a high rate of accumulation as an important feature of Russian society, but denies this is a capitalist feature.
115 K Marx and F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Collected Works, Vol 1 (Moscow, 1962), p37.
116 Ibid.
117 V Selyunin, Sotsialistischeksaya industria, 5 January 1988, translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 24 February 1988. See also A Zaichenko, 'How to divide the pie', Moscow News 24, 1989.
118 K Marx, Capital, vol 1 (
119 See, for instance, G R Feiwel, 'The Standard of Living', in Osteuropa Wirtshaft, February 1980.
120 For an explanation of the recomputation of the figures, see Kaser and Radice, op cit.
121 J Fekete in Gossman (ed), Money and Plan.
122 Figures given in introduction to C Boffito and L Foa, La crisis
123 Figures given in M Kaser, Comecon (
124 According to Col-Gen Babyev, quoted in BBC monitoring report, 4 February 1990.
125 CIA, op cit.
126 This is true as much in the
127 Those who see the
128 The highest estimate is that by the former dissident and now Gorbachev supporter, R Medvedev.
129 F Engels, 'Letter to Danielson', quoted in Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx's Capital, vol 2 (
130 N Bukharin, Imperialism and the World Economy (
131 Quoted in M Haynes and P Binns, 'Eastern European Class Societies', 7, winter 1979.
132 A D H Kaplan, The Liquidation of War Production (New York, 1944), p91.
133 Kaser, op cit, p4.
134 G Ranki and J Tomaszewski, 'The Role of the State in Industry, Banking and Trade', in M Kaser and E Radice, eds, Economic History of Eastern Europe, vol 2, p4.
135 Ranki and Tomaszewski, ibid, pp29 and 45-7.
136 Kaser, Introduction, op cit, p7.
137 A Zauberman, Industrial Growth in
138 Kaser, Introduction, op cit, pl90 cf also Brus, in Kaser and Radice (ed), op cit pp 612-4.
139 Kaser, Introduction, op cit, pi.
140 Oscar Lange, '
141 For an account of these arguments see Brus, op cit, pp612-614.
142 Figures given in B Arnot, Controlling Soviet Labour (
143 Kaser, Introduction op cit, pi. NB His figures exclude
144 Figures given in W D Connor, Socialism's Dilemmas: State and Society in the Soviet Bloc (New York, 1988), pl44.
145 Quoted in Connor, ibid, pl49.
146 For estimates for
147 Studies quoted ibid, p89.
148 Figures quoted ibid, p96.
149 Studies quoted ibid, p97.
150 Quoted ibid, p98.
151 In Marx's terminology, the historically and culturally determined cost of reproducing labour power rises.
152 In Marx's terms, it turned them into labourers who were 'free' of any control over their own means of livelihood.
153 Or, as Marx put it, the rising organic composition of capital causes a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. For an account of the various discussions of Marx's writings on this question, C Harman, Explaining the Crisis (
154 Figures given in K Fitzlyon, Soviet Studies, Summer 1969, pl79.
155 Official figures and Western estimates both given in CIA, op cit.
156 This cumbersome phrase was used by Bukharin to describe the contradictions of the world system of state capitalisms. See his Economics of the Transformation Period (New York, 1971).
157 Figures from N M Bailey, 'Productivity and the Services of Labour and Capital", Brooking Papers, 1981:1, p22.
158 It was empirical observation of this phenomenon which underlay contemporary theories about 'stagnation' in the US economy, such as J Steindl, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (London, 1955) and P Baran and P Sweezy, Monopoly Capita/.
159 For discussion over this question see the articles by M Kidron and myself in (first series) 100.
160 For accounts of these using an early version of the present analysis, see T Cliff, 'Crisis in
161 See C Harman, '
162 Calculations in M Kidron, 'Memories of Development', in Capitalism and Theory (
163 Ibid, pl71.
164 Ibid, pi72.
165 As Kidron mistakenly concluded from an overwhelmingly correct argument, ibid, pl73.
166 For full accounts of these events see my Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe reprinted in an updated edition as Class Struggles in Eastern Europe (the chapters on
167 C Harman, 'Prospects for the Seventies, the Stalinist States', op cit.
168 Figures given by Jiri Kosta, in Nove, Hohmann and Seidenstecker (eds), 77i<> East European Economies in the 1970s (
169 Gierek, transcription of speech in Gierek, Face aux grevistes de
170 Kuron and Modzelewski, A Revolutionary Socialist Manifesto (Open Letter to the Party) (1965 edition), pp37 and 30.
171 For an article I wrote in the mid-1970s I had to plough through detailed official statistics to prove how limited the improvements in living standards really were: see note 5 to my 'Poland and the Crisis of State Capitalism: part two', in (first series) 94.
172 For details of these ventures see ibid, p29.
173 According to International Herald Tribune, 17 August 1976.
174 Figures given in Financial Times, 19 January 1990.
175 See, for example, Alex Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (
176 For such predictions, see references in Class Struggles in Eastern Europe (
177
178 In recent weeks the Western press has been full of quite absurd comparisons of East European and West European living standards, based on comparisons of wages at 'real' (ie, unofficial) exchange rates. But in terms of important items of consumption, like many basic foods, beer, housing and heating costs, workers in East Germany and Czechoslovakia come quite well out of any comparison: for beer, for instance, the East German mark is worth about three Deutschmarks, as opposed to the 'real' exchange rate which values it as between an eigth and a twelfth of the Deutschmark. Where the East German or Czech workers lose out is in terms of things like clothing and, above all electrical goods and cars, which take many more hours of work to buy than in the West. Things are much worse, of course, for the Russian worker who has difficulty getting hold of alcoholic drink and meat as well as good quality clothing and electrical goods.
179 This was the central argument of my article, '
180 C Harman, Class Struggles in
181 Pravda, 5 April 1988.
182 N Ryzhkov, Report on draft guidelines for economic and social development given to 27th congress of CPSU, March 1986.
183 Resolution for the 19th Party Conference on perestroika from the Central Committee of the CPSU.
184 Pravda, 22 August 1985.
185 The estimate for the total number of redundancies due under economic restructuring is from Pravda, 21 January 1988. The figure for redundancies so far comes from Moscow News, 3 September 1989, which quotes a Pravda suggestion that total unemployment in the central Asian republics and
186 Transcript in BBC monitoring reports, January 1989.
187 BBC monitoring reports, February 1989.
188 Pravda, 14 July 1988.
189 In an interview in the London Review of Books, November 1988.
190 hvestia, 10 1988.
191 Central Committee resolution to special conference, in BBC monitoring reports, June 1988.
192 Report on Soviet TV, 17 January 1989, transcript in BBC monitoring reports, January 1989.
193 Pravda, 11 May 1988.
194 For the government's measures, see Ryzhkov's report on the Soviet economy to the Congress of Deputies, TASS, 13 December 1989. For the criticisms of Ryzhkov for 'consolidating commandist methods' see the statement by 23 people's deputies in Komsomolskaya Pravda, 12 December, and the speeches by Popov, Chernyakov and Yeltsin to the Congress of Deputies, TASS 14 December 1989 and Soviet TV 15 December 1989, in BBC monitoring reports. 16 and 20 December 1989.
195 Independent on Sunday, 4 February 1990. The claim about the non-Russian being worse off is accepted by Neil Ascherson in the Independent on Sunday, 11 February 1989.
196 Yakov Roi (ed) The
197 Although he did send in troops to shoot down some hundreds of people in
198 For details see T
199 Y Roi, op cit.
200 Ibid.
201 Guardian, 13 July 1988.
202 Kommunist, 29 September 1988.
203 22 October 1988, in BBC monitoring reports, October 1988.
204 Kommunist (
205 Pravda, 31 October 1989, summarised in BBC monitoring report, 2 November 1989.
206 Pravda, quoted in Moscow News, 3 September 1989.
207 Oleg Voronin of the independent socialist trade union Sotsprof says he has seen documentary proof of the involvement of the
208 This was very much the interpretation put on what was happening by Boris Kagarlitsky in interviews when he was in
209 R Knight, a follower of Frank Furedi, in The Next Step, 26 January 1990.
210 The argument for supporting Gorbachev put by Jeremy Lister of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, at the Campaign for Solidarity with East European Workers conference,
211 C Harman, 'Prospects for the Seventies: the Stalinist States', op cit, pl7.
212 Figures quoted in P Hruby, Fools and Heroes, the Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in
213 Quoted in Hruby, ibid, pi43.
214 For a perceptive contemporary account of this grouping in Poland see Byrski, The Communist "middle class" in the USSR and Poland', Survey, autumn 1969.
215 Financial limes, 13 December 1989.
216 M Simecka, The Restoration of Order (
217 Interview in
218 Quoted in Financial Times, 26 January 1990.
219 For Poland, see the 1965 Open Letter to the Party by Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, republished recently as Solidarnosc: The Missing Link, the account of the opposition in Warsaw at this time in N Karsow and S Schechter, Monuments Are Not Loved (London, 1970), and for Czechoslovakia, see Boffito and Foa, op cit; P Broue (ed) Ecrits a Prague sous la censure (Paris, 1973); Committee to Defend Czechoslovak Socialists, Voices of Czechoslovak Socialists (London, 1977).
220 See L 'eglise et la gauche (Paris. 1979). Part of this is translated as 'The church and the left, a dialogue", in F Silnitsky, L Silnitsky and K Reyman, Communism and Eastern Europe (
221 In the series of essays 'Marx in the Fourth Decade', referred to in F Silnitsky, ibid.
222 This is essentially the position of Haraszti in 'What is Marxism', reprinted in F Silnitsky, ibid, pl48-159.
223 The main argument of Kuron for 'self limited revolution' in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
224 Quoted in C Barker, The Festival of the Oppressed (
225 'The revolution in the Magic Lantern', The
226 Ibid, p48.
227 Prague Radio, 3 January 1990, translated in BBC monitoring report, 5 January 1990.
228 Bjon Kruger of the United Left, interviewed early December 1989.
229 Financial Times, 21 December 1989.
230 Ibid.
231 See report in Financial Times, 3 June 1988.
232 Report quoted in Independent, 10 February 1990.
233 Quoted Financial Times, 13 February 1990.
234 Financial Times, 5 April 1989.
235 Figures in M P Gehlen, 'The Soviet Apparatchiki', in R B Farrell (ed), Political leadership in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (London, 1970), pi47.
236 Quoted in Financial Times, 26 January 1990.
237 In his Issac Deutscher Memorial Lecture in
238 Robert Maxwell, long time apologist for Brezhnev, Jaruzelski, Zhivkov and Ceausescu, now owns a 50 percent share in the 'privatised' Hungarian government paper, while Murdoch has bought control of the main opposition paper and has been in Warsaw seeing which papers he can get control of there.
239 Czechoslovak television, 19 January 1990, transcript in BBC monitoring report 22 January 1990.
240 Sofia Radio, 26 January 1990, transcript in BBC monitoring report, 29 January 1990.
241
242 Quoted,
243 Soviet television, 13 July 1989, transcript in BBC monitoring service report, 15 July 1989.
244 Interviews on Soviet television, 17 July 1989, transcript in BBC monitoring service report, 19 July 1989.
245 Soviet television, 21 July 1989.
246 Interview in
247 Speech to Supreme Soviet, 24 July 1989, in BBC monitoring report, 26 July 1989.
248 A claim I've heard from at least one leading
249 Soviet television, 21 July 1989, transcript in BBC monitoring report, 25 July 1989.
250 Which does not, of course, mean managements have not consciously given workers from certain ethnic or regional origins worse jobs inside the factories than others: temporary workers ('limitchiki') from elsewhere in the USSR in Moscow factories, 'gypsies' in Hungarian enterprises, Vietnamese and Poles in East Germany, Russian speaking immigrants in some plants in the Baltic republics.
251 For some of the arguments that arise see the interviews with members of the PPS-DR in 'Solidarity at the Crossroads', in 41.
252 This was very much the tone of a number of speeches from delegates from the
centre' at the December 1989 congress of the PPS-DR in
253 Even in the
254 Independent, 5 February 1990.