Re: Cochran & Pablo

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

True confessions time. At one point in the 1980s I wasted the best part
of a year as a member of the British Workers' Power group; as close to -
to use the well-worn non-sequiteur - 'orthodox Trotskyism' as I have
ever been. I didn't last long, but I never could really put my finger on
what it was about their politics I couldn't stomach (and, to be fair,
what they couldn't stomach about mine either) until I read an article in
the Next Step (the paper of the then RCP before it disappeared into
complete strangeness) where they justified the policy that it was the
duty of revolutionaries to exclusively champion specifically 'unpopular
causes', the logic being that while the masses (by definition) could
always take up relatively popular issues it was only the revolutionaries
that would (and therefore should) associate themselves with unpopular
matters. And then the penny dropped about the Workers' Power group: if
we ever got anything actually passed by some body that was not solely
composed of ourselves we would question ourselves as to whether we had
not been just a little opportunist; if, on the other hand, we failed to
win any support for our positions, we could always rest comfortably in
the knowledge that we had been 'principled', and it came to me that this
logic had been so strong that these people actually enjoyed being
unpopular and put upon, that this was what their politics effectively
amounted to (and, I'm sorry to say, nearly two decades later, still
does).

So I have to say that I always get nervous when I hear people talking
about the 'one true Trotskyist party', and when, of all people, Louis
Proyect at least partially agrees with such nonsense then I get more
nervous still. So let me put some more of my cards on the table first
though: apart from the moment of personal political madness above, I was
in the USFI as a member from 1981 to 1996, as a sympathiser (more for
logistical than political reasons) to 1999, and though since then I've
not been working in contact with the International this has to do with
living in a foreign country and not speaking the language, and is
something I'm trying to rectify at this very moment. Is the USFI the one
true party, then? Of course not! This has yet to be built: and the
failure to understand this very elementary fact is what marks 90 per
cent of those who do in fact call themselves Trotskyists today as such
sectarians. The idea that you can in this conjuncture build one party
and call it the 'true party' is to fly in the face of not only
everything that the Bolsheviks learned prior and up to 1917 but the very
spirit of Marxism itself; in fact, the idea behind the idea of one true
party is that which says that each class has its ideology and each
ideology its party: and the one class, one party idea is a Stalinist
myth. (As a provocative aside, it is my contention - as I've argued a
number of times before on this list - that in good part what has dogged
the Trotskyist movement is its failure to disentangle Stalinist baggage
from real Marxism; but as I've also pointed out often enough here it's
the content and not the label that matters, so I'm going to argue it
here in concrete terms.)

How do you build a revolutionary party? There is an idea - false but
ubiquitous - that Marxist orthodoxy says that you start with the
programme and that everything else flows from this. But this is
formalistic nonsense. The revolutionary party functions if it does as a
totaliser of the practical experiences of the struggles of the class:
its programme results from the generalising process of these
experiences. The first obvious consequence of this is that outside of a
mass movement a party that aspires to be a revolutionary party is such
only in its aspirations, its potential. I previously posted a comment
Perry Anderson made on Lenin in relation to this subject to this list,
and it is so important that it deserves repeating.

'The final word can rest with Lenin. His famous dictum that "without
revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement", is often
and rightly quoted. But he also wrote, with equal weight: "Correct
revolutionary theory [...] assumes final shape only in close connection
with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary
movement." Every clause here counts. Revolutionary theory can be
undertaken in relative isolation -- Marx in the British Museum, Lenin in
war-bound Zurich: but it can only acquire a *correct* and *final* form
when bound to the collective struggles of the working class itself. Mere
formal membership of a party organisation, of the type familiar in
recent history, does not suffice to provide such a bond: a *close
connection* with the *practical activity* of the proletariat is
necessary. Nor is militancy in a small revolutionary group enough: there
must be a linkage with actual masses. Conversely, linkage with a mass
movement is not enough either, for the latter may be reformist: it is
only when the masses are *themselves revolutionary*, that theory can
complete its eminent vocation. These five conditions for the successful
pursuit of Marxism have not been assembled anywhere in the advanced
capitalist world since the Second World War. [...] When a truly
revolutionary movement is born in a mature working class, the final
shape of theory will have no exact precedent.'

For all of his later sins, what Anderson gives us here is as good a
summary of the Leninist theory of organisation as could be wished. To
start from the abstract programme, as a set of timeless principles,
divorced from real struggles, abstracted from the day-to-day life of the
class, has nothing to do with it, and is what has ruined a good part of
the Trotskyist movement. On what was the IS-IC split based? Ostensibly,
over an estimation of the direction of development of post-WW2
Stalinism. In this sense what the IS tradition represented was a genuine
attempt to get to grips with a phenomenon that was relatively new: the
old understanding (an accurate assessment in the 1930s but tired dogma
in the late 1940s and beyond) that what Stalinism represented was the
international politics that sought to maintain the interests of the
soviet bureaucracy at the expense of the international working class
clearly no longer held true (China, Yugoslavia), and the IS tradition -
'Pabloism' - attempted to develop an understanding of this. Of course,
the IS/IC conflict was also composed of its fair share of bureaucratic
manoeuvrings, yet this in turn was in good part an internalisation of
the worst of the traditions of the degenerating Comintern of the 1920s,
call it 'Stalinism', 'Zinovievism' or what you will (and from my own
involvement in the faction fight between the Mandelistas and the
Barnseites I heartily echo Louis' comments on how not to conduct such
political struggles). It was to the credit of the SWP (US) leadership
that it refused to follow the road of this dogmatism to its conclusions,
a failure which took it into the 1963 reunification rather than the
Healyite swamp. 

So I look favourably on the IS/USFI tradition, on 'Pabloism' if you
will; for me, in the very less than favourable situation that we are
faced with in terms of building revolutionary organisations, it is the
current that I would identify as at least the least flawed. Which is by
no means to say that it is beyond criticism. If a charge of
'opportunism' - 'liquidationism' is an ugly word which has a false
emphasis - is to made against any current then it has to be made against
this one. And by opportunism I mean the way in which each new popular
movement or development assumes an importance beyond its real nature,
becomes the centre of all questions of revolutionary politics, is taken
on its own terms or on its own level of consciousness or, worse, on the
level of consciousness of its leadership: the way each new development
becomes a short-cut, a get rich quick schema of the road to social
revolution, a bandwagon to be jumped on. Nevertheless - and in my time
as a part of the USFI tradition I always approached it - and encouraged
others to do the same - critically. For me, waiting for the pure,
pristine party to emerge unflawed from the class struggle always seemed
anathematical to Marxism. I always preferred sensitivity to the real
world, for all its dangers, to ignorance of and indifference towards it.

So for me one crucial part of what building a revolutionary party means
is precisely this attempt to break from dogmatism, 'principleism': the
construction of a 'programme' which actually turns out to be nothing
more than a set of increasingly ridiculous shibboleths. But on the other
hand, of course, the other part of building a party - the part I talk
about above - is also the struggle for generalisation, the struggle to
break from localism. For if a failure to escape from the dangers of
sectarianism as I outline it above is deadly then the inability to see
what is general and what is specific in concrete struggles - i.e. the
tendency towards opportunist short-termism - is the burden that the
IS/USFI tradition has born: if Lenin said that anarchism was a price
paid for the opportunist sins of the labour movement then we can say
that opportunist short-termism is the price paid (by the IS/USFI
current) for the sectarian sins of 'orthodox Trotskyism'. Indeed, the
struggle to, if you like, generalise the concrete was not only
fundamental to the method and theory of Marx and Engels but was also the
specific contribution that Lenin made with his theory of revolutionary
organisation, and was precisely that which the early Comintern, as it
tried to win to itself forces from the existing currents within the
international workers' movements, attempted - not always with success -
to do (which is why I am chary about attempts 'to create a new
revolutionary movement based on indigenous traditions' à la Cochran, for
example, however well-meaning these attempts may be). What Richard
Fidler accounts in his discussion of the formation of the early
Communist Party in Britain was precisely an attempt to break the most
advanced layer of the organised British state working class movement
form a localist, sectoralised outlook; an outlook typified on the one
hand by a knee-jerk sectarianism - however prettified by revolutionary
syndicalism - towards the labour bureaucracy and those tarnished by
association with the labour bureaucracy and on the other by a routinist
accommodation to the view that the 'official' movement was the movement
and that to break just one iota from officialdom would spell disaster.
Both of these approaches had kernels that were partially correct, but
the devil was to lie in the 'partial', as the subsequent history of the
CPGB and those currents - including in major part what has subsequently
passed itself off as 'Trotskyism' ( and a fine Zinovievist concept
this!) - was to show. If there is a charge to be laid against the
tradition represented by the IS/USFI - and there is - then it is this:
taking the concrete at face value, a failure to avoid being sucked into
a localist, sectoralist detour, to see the moment but not its context -
precisely, a failure to generalise. But the fundamental element of the
method I am advocating is that what makes a revolutionary programme is
not an aggregate of the various struggles but a transcendence of these
struggles and their lessons: it needs, in short, organisation. And that
is what a revolutionary party needs to be and needs to do. Counterposed
to this, what Alex is putting forward seems to be the old method of
flag-planting, of announcing yourself with your programme and waiting
for the masses to realise that you're right (and as we all know - or
should know - if the revolution could be won solely by means of rational
argument then we would have won it a long, long time ago). This is, of
course, nothing more than the good old fashioned Sunday afternoon
speechifying of BSP or SDF vintage, and it negates the need to actually
participate in the struggles in which the masses participate, and to
participate in the organisations of the masses which arise from these
struggles, which seek to influence these struggles, and to which the
masses look for a lead, be they trade unions, short-term campaigns or
social-democratic or centrist parties. This of course impinges on our
discussion of Labour Parties, in which, perhaps it has been lost, the
fundamental question is not one or 'principle' but a tactical assessment
of what is going on in the class and between classes - a concrete
analysis of a concrete situation, if you like. Nevertheless, getting
your hands dirty in the organisations of the class is fundamental for
revolutionary socialists, and a conception of the need to maintain some
kind of 'revolutionary purity' is the clear sign post for becoming a
sect. The formulation I've always liked (it's Trotsky's) is that of
'draw closer to the masses; fight the right-wing leaders'. If Alex is
seriously suggesting therefore, tirading against 'liquidationism', that
'Trotskyists' should stay out of, for example, Rifondazione Communista,
the Brazilian PT or the Portuguese Bloco Esquerda then that really is,
in the words of the Communist Manifesto, setting up sectarian principles
of one's own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement; it
is abstaining from not only the duty of revolutionaries to draw closer
to the masses but also to abstain from fighting the right-wing leaders.
Of course, the one goes with the other: to participate in these
organisations on the political terms of their leaders (or even on the
terms of the average level of consciousness of the base) would indeed be
opportunism, and as I have said the main charge that can be made against
the whole IS/USFI tradition is this one; I'm far from blind to that. But
that is where you *start*. As the old saying has it, if I wanted to go
to Tipperary I wouldn't start from here, but here is where we do have to
start from, and if you offer me, as where I should go to exercise the
tiny leverage that as an individual I can exercise towards what as a
revolutionary socialist I believe to be the burning historical necessity
of our generation, the choice of, on the one hand, a tradition which
posits abstention from the political battles of our class as point of
principle, or a tradition which sees the need to engage with the world
*in order* to *change* it, then I know - from bitter experience - where
I want to be.

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