Labour parties

["Steve Painter and Rose McCann" <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Gould responds to Jose Perez, Ben Courtice, Phillip Ferguson and
Jurriaan Bendien

The discussion in Marxmail on strategy and tactics in the labour movement is
revealing and useful and has gone in a number of directions.

There are really three strands of opinion in conflict, and the historical
context is important, because all three strands, including my own, appeal to
the authority of Lenin in support of their current tactical views.

In my view, Phillip Ferguson and the Revolutionary Communist Group in
Britain are part of a distinct current of opinion in the socialist movement,
what I would describe as principled sectarianism. This current that has a
long lineage, back to the Council Communists, with whom Lenin argued, and in
the US, to Daniel De Leon.

This modern school includes the RCG, Phillip Ferguson's group, two currents
of left communists and Bordigists who publish magazines in western Europe
(largely arguing with each other), the LM-RCP group in Britain, the
Socialist Equality Party and the Spartacist League. In this ultimatist
political universe, there are only the Marxists, the particular group
themselves, fighting against all the bourgeois forces in society, which is
everybody else in society. These bourgeois forces, particularly include all
existing workers' organisations and their leaderships.

To these maximalist groupings, the sociology of existing workers'
organisations and their supporters is unimportant.

My careful exposition of the current sociology of workers' organisations is
not going to have much impact there, but nevertheless the discussion between
us has some value. As Jurriaan Bendien points out, in relation to Phil
Ferguson, many of these groups reject entirely any struggle for reforms,
which they consider integrate the working class into capitalism. A number of
these groups, in particular, denounce trade unions and trade unionism as
integrating the working class into the system. In their universe, the only
task is propaganda for the socialist revolution.

James P. Cannon, in his inimitable agitator's way, had a famous funny story
about this kind of formation. After the Trotskyists were thrown out of the
Communist Party in the US, they got an indirect message from a group of the
old "underground" faction of the Communist Party in Boston, who said in
their message, that they agreed with the program of the Trotskyists. Cannon
trotted up to Boston to talk to them. After much discussion, the
"undergrounders" appeared to agree with the Trotskyist program. Then the
undergrounders' leader said there was just one condition, of course, the new
party must be totally underground and have nothing to do with bourgeois
parliaments and parliamentarism. Cannon said he cracked a few little jokes,
put on his hat and went home. Cannon's attitude towards the undergrounders
is pretty much my attitude towards the maximalist tradition. Some of their
ideas are of some value in a formal way, but no revolutionary socialist
movement can be constructed in that spirit.

The DSP and Jose Perez are a different proposition. They are not principled
maximalist ultraleftists. In this discussion, for, what appears to me
demagogic, reasons they use arguments, drawn from maximalist ultraleftism,
in an instrumental way to attack the leaderships, the middle ranks and the
supporters of traditional workers' organisations, and the organisations
themselves as institutions. They use this polemical stance to separate
themselves from any relationship with these traditional workers'
organisations and to justify a non-class politics, in which no significant
class difference is recognised between the universe of the existing workers'
organisations, on the one hand, and the outright capitalist political
parties on the other.

For instance, Jose believes there's no essential difference between
intervening in the crisis of a mass reformist organisation (in which the
unions are dominant) and calling for a vote for a particular candidate in a
US Democratic Party primary. In Australia the DSP fights hard to get Malcolm
Fraser, the former Tory prime minister, as a main speaker on an antiwar
platform, and ridicules the traditional distinction made by Trotsky between
workers' fronts and people's fronts.

Ben Courtice, who I know and respect, as a hard-working DSP activist with
serious theoretical interests, uses ultraleft arguments and formulations
drawn, for polemical purposes, from the maximalist school, but the practice
of his own organisation has another dimension, of an opportunist character.
It's important in this discussion to keep in mind the three distinct current
that exist in these matters: what can be reasonably described as the Bob
Gould-Richard Price current, the DSP current, and the traditional ultraleft
current, represented in such an articulate way by Phillip Ferguson.

I don't want to be pejorative about these classifications, because people in
all three currents are serious activists who believe certain things for a
number of reasons, (for instance while I disagree with the ultraleft
current, from time to time they produce very useful things, I don't like the
Spartacists much, but their lengthy discussion of Trotsky, Zinoviev and the
German Communists in 1923 is useful work, and the Prometheus Books edition
of the unpublished early work of Cannon, when he was a leader of the CP is a
valuable research tool).

RECLAIMING LENIN FROM THE "LENINISTS"

For a large part of my 50 years of political life I've been hopelessly out
of fashion, so to speak. The current attempts to bury Lenin ideologically by
the bourgeoisie, of which the latest example is the misanthropic Martin
Amis, don't impress me in the slightest. In my view, any intelligent
approach to socialist and Marxist politics inevitably starts with Lenin.

In the first part of this contribution I intend to rely on my understanding
of the thought and spirit of Lenin's political activity, and it seems useful
to me to recommend some sources. Firstly, Lenin's own work, and secondly
some books about Lenin and Leninism: one is "Leninism Under Lenin" by Marcel
Leibman (I actually produced an article by Leibman on the "committee men"
out of Monthly Review as a small pamphlet during my rancorous split with the
Percy brothers in 1970, and I still have copies of that pamphlet for sale).

The second book of great importance is the book by Paul Leblanc. A third
book I would recommend is "Lenin, the Novel" by Alan Brien. I would also
recommend the very serious political biography of Lenin by the
anti-communist, Robert Service, because while it's antagonistic to Lenin, it
's a useful biography by the sort of political opponent from whom one can
learn. In this category also, is the relatively recent book edited by the
arch-reactionary, Richard Pipes, "The Unknown Lenin", a collection of
previously suppressed material from the Soviet archives selected by Pipes,
because he considers it embarrassing to Lenin. These documents, properly
assessed, are of considerable value to serious students of Lenin, because
they give some further insight into the dialectical character of Lenin's
thought and practice. Also useful to a serious study of Lenin are the
collection "Not by Politics Alone, the Other Lenin" edited by Tamara
Deutscher, "Lenin's Last Struggle" by Moshe Lewin and T.H. Rigby's important
book on Lenin's Sovnarkom, which gives a vital insight into Lenin's energy,
efficiency and ingenuity as a government leader and administrator.

A small pamphlet by Mick Armstrong and Marc Newman of Socialist Alternative
in Australia and the recent posting on Marxmail "Lenin in Context" are also
useful.

Most of the Stalinist literature about Lenin is of no use, and Zinoviev's
Lenin hagiography about building the Bolshevik party, is of limited use
because it tailors its description of the actual practice of Lenin to an
idealised model useful to the developing bureaucracy in the Soviet Union
under the Triumvirate. Tony Cliff's Lenin volumes also suffer a bit from
Cliff "bending the stick" a bit too far, to create an idealised picture of
what the Bolshevik party was actually like.

It's also important to at least have a look at Volume 38 of Lenin's
Collected Works, in which Lenin develops his view of Marxist philosophy, but
as this is pretty dense, it can be approached via Raya Danayevska's or Cliff
Slaughter's introductions to this material.

The ultraleft current leans heavily on the over-used rhetorical flourish
used by Lenin in attempting to persuade reluctant ultralefts to intervene in
the crisis of Socialist Democracy: "support Labour like the rope supports a
hanging man". At about the same time Lenin was sending sharply worded notes
to the British Communists urging them to spend money on a large scale and
act as election agents trying to get Ramsay McDonald's Labourites elected in
Britain.

It's important to actually look at the evolution of Lenin's ideas and
tactical recommendations. As Marx used to say "history is whole cloth".

In an article in the useful book, Lenin on Britain, (Russian Foreign
Language Publishers) Preface to the Russian translation of letters by
Engels, Marx and others to F.A. Sorge, (pages 47-67) (Lenin, April 6, 1907).
This article informs us about Lenin's attitude towards strategy and tactics
in workers organisations, and his understanding of Marx and Engels attitude
to these organisations. (I'm hoping that Steve can make this available on
the Ozleft website.)

This article underlines the point that, in Lenin's understanding, Marx and
Engels were opposed to small groups of socialists setting themselves
deliberately outside large workers' movements. It was important to defend
the full program of Marxism, but it was also important for socialists to
soak themselves in the bigger workers' movements, and attempt to lead and
influence them.

This spirit pervaded all of Lenin's subsequent attitude to labour parties in
Britain, the United States, and by inference, Australia.

After the massive betrayal of the leadership of Social Democracy in 1914,
Lenin and the Bolsheviks attempted a serious analysis of the deep causes and
circumstances that produced this betrayal, and this is the context in which
Zinoviev wrote the useful pamphlet, which the DSP has reproduced for
educational purposes, and this is also the context in which Lenin wrote the
Split in Socialism http://www.marx2mao.org/Lenin/ISS16.html to which Ben
Courtice refers.

This was an attempt by Lenin and Zinoviev to analyse the sociology of the
workers movements in the imperialist countries up to that time. Some modern
Marxists have the view that even at this time Lenin and Zinoviev overstated
the significance of the labour aristocracy. Certainly, the Bolsheviks in the
1920s made a realistic balance sheet of the relationship of forces in the
workers' movement, and concluded, at the early congresses of the Comintern,
that the mass reformist parties based on the trade unions in Britain and
Australia, still had pretty well total hegemony in the workers' movements of
those countries. From this flowed a united front strategy towards those mass
workers' organisations, despite their reactionary leaderships, and --
without spelling it out too clearly for tactical reasons -- the need to do
serious socialist  work inside those organisations.

The book Left Wing Communism, and  Lenin's and Trotsky's speeches to the
early Comintern congresses, remained the general understanding of Marxists
on these questions, until the monstrous Third Period strategy was imposed by
Stalin as part of the degeneration of the Comintern.

In the 1930s Trotsky returned to these questions with his deliberate and
repeated advice to the British Trotskyists to adopt an entry tactic in the
British Labour Party, and this tactical recommendation was also based on a
realistic appraisal of the disproportionate nature of the forces involved,
the Labour Party being an enormous, sociologically proletarian organisation,
based on the unions, by comparison with which the British Communists were a
small sect and the British Trotskyists a tiny sect.

These kinds of tactical judgments, based on a realistic appraisal of the
relationship of forces in the workers' movement, was what dictated the
tactic of entrism adopted by a big majority of Trotskyists of all currents
in Britain and Australia in the post-war period.

 Throughout the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s, the US Trotskyists,
consistently advocated the formation in the United States, of a labour party
similar to those in Britain and Australia, based on the affiliation of the
trade unions.

They advocated the formation of such a labour party, despite its inevitable
initial domination by reformism, as a necessary first stage in independent,
working-class development.

This tactic of the united front, towards mass labour parties based on the
unions, as in Britain and Australia, thus has an honourable, proud and
defensible Marxist-Leninist proletarian lineage.

The formulation adopted by the Australian DSP, for instance, in the
pamphlet, Revolutionary Strategy and Tactics in the Trade Unions (1983), is
a useful summary of this strategic view. On pages 43 and 44, this pamphlet
says:

"In Australia, the fight to transform the unions into revolutionary
instruments, must be waged in the Australian Labor Party, as well as in the
unions themselves. In its form of organisation, the ALP is the party of the
trade unions; in the content of its program and actions, it is the political
expression of the union bureaucracy. The unions cannot become revolutionary
instruments of the proletariat while the majority of the proletariat remains
politically subordinate to the bourgeois program of the ALP.

"In general, however, revolutionaries favour union affiliation to the ALP,
while that party continues to have the allegiance of the big majority of the
working class. The spurious ideal of trade union "independence" in politics
is not a break with the bourgeois program of the ALP. It is a break with
what is progressive in the Labor Party: the understanding that the
proletariat requires its own political party, separate from and opposed to
the parties of the capitalists.

"It is impossible for the unions to be independent of politics. Either they
adopt proletarian politics, or they support, actively or passively,
bourgeois politics. Thus the task at present is not to break the
organisational links between the unions and the ALP; the task is to break
the unions from their subordination to the bourgeois politics of class
collaboration, whether in the form of the ALP program or the daily practice
of the union bureaucracy.

"Revolutionary propaganda therefore argues for union involvement in and
control of the activities of the Labor Party, not to reinforce the status
quo, but as part of a fight to end the ALP's subordination to the interests
of capital, to change it from a political instrument of the union
bureaucracy, to a political instrument of proletarian militants.

"It is only along this line of simultaneous struggle against the agents of
the bourgeoisie, in the unions and in the Labor Party, that the
revolutionary party can increase its own influence, correctly orient the
class struggle left wing as it arises, and win the real leadership of the
organised and unorganised proletariat."

When the DSP dumped the old "Trotskyism" in 1984, and made some moves in the
direction of Stalinism, it ditched this analysis. In the 1995 reprint of the
pamphlet, Doug Lorimer has this piece of slightly dishonest mumbo-jumbo, as
an explanation for the DSP's new line:

"The DSP's previous characterisation of the ALP, which it had inherited from
the Trotskyist movement's analysis of Social Democratic parties around the
world, was based on the determination of the class character of a political
party not only by its program - its real aims and the means by which it
seeks their attainment - but also by the class composition of its membership
and supporters. This approach, however, represents a departure from the
Marxist method of analysing social phenomena ...
"Thus, for Marxists, the class character of a political party is not
determined by the class that supports it at any particular time, but by what
class the party supports, ie, by the party's program, by its real aims and
basic policy. From this point of view, the only correct one for Marxists,
the ALP is not a worker's but a bourgeois party."

Lorimer simply asserts without serious explanation as to why, that the
Trotskyists were wrong about all the sociology, and that the only thing that
mattered in this context was the program of political parties.

People and organisations as diverse as the Revolutionary Communist Group,
which Ben Courtice relies on, Lorimer and the DSP, Phillip Ferguson and Jose
Perez all assert this proposition, that program is the only consideration
and the sociology of workers' organisations is unimportant. Anyone can make
such assertions if they wish, as Trotsky said in relation to the Stalinists
in the 1930s, paper will take any rubbish that's written on it. It's totally
ahistorical and unscientific, however, to associate this political approach
with Lenin.

Lenin's political thought and practice had two axes. One was the
independence of the Marxist organisation and program as developed in
practice by Marxist organisations, but the other axis of Lenin's thought and
strategy was a total realism in political practice, one aspect of which was
realism in relation to the grip and power of mass workers' organisations
based on trade unions.

The aspiration of Marxist organisations to displace the existing reformist
leaderships of the mass organisations, dictated the necessity of a united
front tactic by the Marxist organisations towards the mass reformist
organisations.

All of that is there in Lenin's writings and political practice for those
who have eyes to see it, and assertions about program being the total
determinant and the sociology being unimportant are an anti-Leninist
invention.

These questions are important, not to be dismissed summarily and I raise
them sharply with the DSP, the ISO and others because I consider them to be
of critical importance to the further development of the socialist movement.

Richard Price in the UK has just written a useful article
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Price.html on these matters in
which he characterised most of the groups in the British Socialist Alliance
as "Third-Period Trotskyists", a characterisation that I find useful and
attractive, and he attaches the resolution of the British Communist Party in
1929, adopting the Third Period line.

This contribution should be considered in conjunction with the empirical
sociology in The People's Choice, a review on the Ozleft website.
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/People's%20Choice.html

In my next contribution I will discuss the sociological formulations of Ben
Courtice, Jose Perez and Phil Ferguson in relation to the mass workers'
movements, and in another contribution I will discuss the political practice
and internal life of the DSP in Australia in the context of Peter Boyle's
dismissive remarks about myself and his ingenuous defence of the regime of
the DSP.

To be continued (shortly).





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