Re: markets, shibboleths, multiplicity

[Adam Rose <adam@xxxxxxxx>]

I think Lisa is genuinely puzzled by my harsh response to the market
socialists. I am equally puzzled by her tolerance. The mutual
puzzlement comes about because it is not details of each other's
posts which forms the disagreement, but the overall tone. It is
puzzling, because on most other issues we can discuss and disagree
in a comradely manner.

I think an explanation of my attitude can only make sense in the
context of an explanation of what I think the real revolutionary
tradition is.

The absolute bedrock of this tradition is the idea that "the
emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class".
This tradition has been half buried by the second and
third internationals, by reformism and stalinism.

The conception of a workers revolution and a workers state is based
upon the high points in the class struggle itself. Marx only
declared that the proletariat could not lay hands on the
existing state but had to smash it after the Communards had come
to this conclusion in practise.

The more advanced working class in Russia invented the Soviets which
Lenin and Trosky analysed theoretically as the form of workers power
appropriate to a more advanced capitalist economy. Every revolutionary
workers movement since then has comfirmed this basic analysis. These
centralised workers councils, where no delegate is paid more than the
people they represent, where every delegate is subject to instant recall
by the people that elected them, where the decision makers are also the
decision implementors, have been constructed by workers in the interests
of their struggle without reading Marx or Lenin or Trotsky.

Yet every time this has happened, these institutions have been drowned in
blood. Of course Hitler and Franco were the main butchers in the 30's.
But it must be remembered that the people responsible for Hitler and
Franco were Stalinists and Reformists. It was Stalinists that crushed
the Spanish Revolution; it was Left Wing Social Democrats that ordered
the police to murder Liebkecht and Rosa Luxembourg. This happened because
the revolutionary tradition, epitomised by Marx, Engels, Lenin + Trostky
as its giants, but also by people like Oscar Hippe in Germany ( who
was in the SPD, then the KPD, then the Troskyists, who was imprisoned
by the Nazis and then the Stalinists ) or the "Balham Group" in Britain,
was not strong enough.

But what weakened the working class was not the out and out ideas of
capitalism, which make little sense in revolutionary situations, but
ideas which attempt to marry ideas based on the class struggle with
ideas which uphold capitalism. The people who murdered Luxembourg and
Liebknecht did so because they wanted the workers councils to exist
alongside parliament. The people who strangled the Spanish Revolution
did so not because they opposed socialism but because they wanted it
postponed. This is why I am very jealous of that tradition - because
I don't want these disasters to occur again.

The common objection to defining the revolutionary tradition in a narrow
way is the charge of "sectarianism". But I think this charge is based on
a misunderstanding of that tradition. Part of that tradition, after all,
is the rejection of ultra leftism and the insistence that revolutionaries
work in Trade Unions, Parliament etc, and the tradition of the united
front.

Also, I think that this tradition rejects the method which forces abstract
schemes on reality. So the Polish workers who in practise rediscovered
their revolutionary tradition during 1980 - 81 are closer to that
tradition than the so called "Troskyists" who dismissed that movement
as counter revolutionary, and the new left "humanist" 1950's historians closer
to it than their more formally correct Stalinist opponents. While I would
argue that my particular tradition, the International Socialists, are part
of that revolutionary heritage, I wouldn't argue that we have exclusive
right to it, but I would argue that, in the light of history, we are
right to be very jealous of it. That is why I do not treat the market
socialists in a comradely manner. To the extent that we accept their
arguments, when the practical choice is the market or socialism, capitalism
or workers power, we will be paralysed in the middle, unable to act, and so
leave the field open for the Tony Blairs of this world.

Adam.

Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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