[Marxism] Re: Should state capitalism/workers state be part of a group's program?

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joaquín is surely absolutely right here. The struggle for revolutionary 
organisation is not simply a battle of ideas, for the truth of ideas is 
only measurable against practice. It is clear idealism to believe that 
one can come up with the right line on this or that question without 
putting that line, in some way, to a practical test; and, very 
importantly, that there needs to be some collective mechanism whereby a 
serious balance can be drawn of that practice. This is, for me, how I’ve 
always understood the Theses on Feuerbach; and, as I’ve frequently said 
here, how I understand what Lenin is talking about in What I To Be Done.

So, ultimately, what determines the revolutionary character of an 
organisation is what it does, even if, of course, what it does is in 
some degree determined by what it thinks (and, likewise, that what it 
thinks is in turn determined by what it does). Doesn’t even Trotsky 
write somewhere during the debates with the Burnham-Shactman people that 
the critical thing was not that some people had developed an incorrect 
(for him, and for me) position on the class nature of the Soviet State 
but what that meant in terms of what you did about it: that it was 
perfectly in order to hold a state capitalist or bureaucratic 
collectivist position on the Soviet Union if this didn’t mean (however 
contradictory this might be) that you that you didn’t defend the Soviet 
Union in the coming war. An analogy today would be that holding a state 
capitalist position (or degenerated workers state position for that 
matter) on Cuba should be no obstacle in itself to common organisation 
(outside of Cuba, that is) as long as this didn’t lead people not to 
defend Cuba from imperialist pressure and attack.

Which is not to say that a battle of ideas is not important. ‘Wrong’ 
ideas can led to ‘incorrect’ practice. Trotsky does say I think that (in 
the 1930s) holding that the Soviet Union is not a workers state is a 
problem because such a position, if followed logically can lead you to 
not defend it in imperialist war; but that the key question is not the 
wrong idea but the practical conclusions (and, I would add, that what 
ultimately leads to bad practice is not ultimately bad ideas; 
ultimately, social being still determines social consciousness). The 
point for me is that ideological-theoretical-historical debates divorced 
and removed from practice can only by their nature be scholastic. 
Joaquín is quite right when he says that this always comes down to 
taking somebody’s word for it, and how can you know whose word to take. 
This was always a common lament of new members in the revolutionary 
organisations I’ve been a member of when confronted by opposed positions 
in inner-party debate: ‘How do I know who is right?’ And Marx 
*explicitly* states this in the Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The question 
whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a 
question of theory but is a practical question. [...] The dispute over 
the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is 
a purely scholastic question.’

And again Joaquín is quite right when he observes that, ‘If it were 
really true that you can reliably come up with the correct line from 
halfway around the world, people would have figured it out by now, and 
we, for example, in this country would have made a revolution by now by 
following the recommendations of some politburo in India or
Brazil.’ This really sharp, for the ‘international democratic 
centralists’ are nearly always those who demand of the periphery that it 
follow the correct thinking of the centre, not the other way around. It 
is not just that it would be possible to come up with the right line 
from somewhere half way round the world, it is that that somewhere half 
way round the world is invariably in the imperialist heartlands. This is 
the kind of revolutionary chauvinism what I was criticising recently 
with the Grant-Woods current in relation to Venezuela.

What would the ‘split issues’ be? What would be the grounds to justify 
separate organisation? It seems to me that there is no magic formula for 
this, that in any given geographical and political context this is 
something that is dependent on that context itself. The tradition I come 
from (British state Usec) is one that believed with its heart and soul 
that ‘you don’t split on tactics, you split on programme.’ But this, I 
am increasingly coming to think, is dogmatic thinking. I increasingly 
can’t agree with this rigid distinction between tactics and programme: I 
increasingly think that these things are different aspects of the same 
thing, which is revolutionary socialist organisation, something which 
has tactical and programmatic (and strategic) aspects. Each of these 
aspects will be more prominent at different times: in one set of 
circumstances it may well be the case that tactical questions 
predominate, to the point of being the focus of splits and regroupments; 
in others, maybe programmatic elements are more important and tactical 
disagreements, even quite sharp tactical disagreements, something one 
can live with, even within single organisations. Once you take one of 
these elements and raise it to being the most important thing, not just 
in one set of concrete circumstances, but always and forever, like a 
principle, then I think you’re absolutely starting to turn into a sect. 
When Lenin talks about ‘flexibility’ in organisation, this is what he 
means, I think: that the political basis of an organisation will depend 
on the necessities of the class struggle in a given instance, and the 
particular form of organisation is in turn determined in function of 
this. This is certainly the case if you look, as Joaquín has here so 
clearly argued, at what Marx and Engels did in terms of practical 
politics. This means, of course, that dogmatic thinking is not going to 
suffice to work out quite literally ‘What Is To Be Done’: there are no 
principles to guide us in revolutionary organisation (and consequently 
practice). To believe that there are is to think dogmatically, and like 
a sect.

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