Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 76 – the Universal class

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When most people come to oppose capitalism they do so in recognition of the oppression which they personally suffer or see in others, giving rise to more than sorrow or despair but a visceral reaction against it.  The various oppressions perpetuated under capitalism are identified and given names, such as women’s oppression and sexism, racial oppression and racism, the oppression of gay people and homophobia, while the poor are those who suffer from poverty and inequality.

When Marx started to develop his understanding of society and its oppression, and how it had been understood by philosophers before him, he asked the question–in critiquing the German philosopher Hegel’s Philosophy of Right–what was ‘the possibility of a German emancipation?’

He answered: ‘In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it . . .  a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’

While starting from the nature of the working class’s suffering and oppression he quickly argued that this class was the means by which all social suffering and oppression could be dissolved.  The ‘radical chains’ oppressing the working class gave rise to interests that encompassed the abolition of all social oppression ‘through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.” (Marx and Engels The German Ideology MECW Vol 5 p 88)

The universal character of the working class is central to Marxism but, as we noted at the beginning, it is often through recognition of different oppressions that opposition to capitalism arises, with the various forms treated as separate and subject to different causes and prominence.  This arises partly from starting from the particular suffering incurred and the salience at any particular time.  As has been noted before, the oppression of Jewish women in Germany from 1933 to the Holocaust was determined by their being Jews, not women, while the oppression of Palestinians by the state of Israel, claiming to be the state of all Jews, is the result of national oppression.

However, accounts based on theories of ethnic, religious, women’s, or national oppression cannot explain why all of them have occurred and still exist, how they can be ended, and what the alternative was in the 30’s and is now.  The answer to these questions rests on a cogent class analysis and alternative to capitalism, including in its imperialist form, and the replacement by a society ruled by the working class.

In the two examples referenced, it is clear that the working class and socialism is an alternative to German imperialism and its Nazi ideology, and to the settler colonial Israeli state, its US imperialist sponsor, and the ideology of Zionism that justifies their actions.  This obviously does not mean that a working class–socialist answer is universally accepted but it can readily be acknowledged even by those who do not accept its arguments that socialism provides a relevant analysis and offers an alternative.

This is not the case with many opponents of other forms of oppression, for whom the working class and its interests, expressed in a socialist programme, is undesirable, irrelevant or not a primary concern. There is no claim on their part to be universal in the sense put forward by Marx.

If they do not identify capitalism as the problem, they often damn capitalism in such a way that they argue that the bad bits that engender women’s oppression or racial oppression etc. can be removed, indulging an understanding of capitalism that does not permit its abolition but envisages it continuing, with different nomenclature covering up its continued existence.  What is proposed is therefore just a reform of capitalism but with some changed secondary characteristics that allow it be called non-patriarchal, non-racist, anti-colonial, social-democratic, mixed economy, or simply ‘democratic’ but with no fundamental change to the economic and social system, and therefore no fundamental political change either.

Of course, there are always those for whom a more equal and just capitalism is the objective, in which case, for them, the exploitation and oppression of the working class either does not exist, can be sufficiently ameliorated, or is unimportant; a capitalism guaranteeing gender, racial and other social equality is enough. Class oppression would then have no biased outcomes based or sex or race etc.

Others who might have sympathy with the emancipation of the working class may consider that socialism does not directly address the particular oppression which is their primary concern, whether it be women’s oppression or racism, and they therefore prioritise these.  Often, this entails the view that the exploitation and oppression of the working class involves economic oppression, which might sit alongside others, but which has no claim to priority, never mind any pretence to universality.

For Marxists, however, none of this subverts the validity of the proletariat as the universal class whose emancipation involves not only its own emancipation but that of other oppressed groups, including all those within its own ranks.  This involves assertion of the importance of socialist revolution to working class emancipation, and that its scope cannot be encompassed in some notion of purely economic emancipation but involves the complete reordering of society and all its social relationships, which no other perspective of liberation can promise.

Marxists claim this because, among other reasons, of their understanding of what capitalism entails, which other ‘anti-capitalists’ do not.  This is why Marx recognised the revolutionary character of the capitalist mode of production and why simple anti-capitalism is not at all an adequate designation of what an alternative is.  He would certainly not have endorsed the slogan “another world is possible” as doing not much more than begging more questions than it answers. As the text of The Communist Manifesto makes clear, not even all socialisms are adequate, and some were positively reactionary, although that too, like the universal character of the working class, is no longer in fashion. Some values, such as pluralism, have been made absolute.

It means that the revolutionising of social relations by working class revolution involves not just economic liberation of the working class but the abolition of all classes including the working class itself.  The complete reordering of the economic and social basis of society involves changes to all aspects of it:

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1859 Marx)

The working class revolution and its emancipation therefore does not just upturn economic and socials relations but also the entire superstructure of society including the state and intellectual life generally – the ideas people have of themselves, of others and of society generally.  This leads not just to the abolition of classes and therefore exploitation and oppression but also of the state and its oppression and repression.

The work quoted at the start of this post recalled Marx’s critique of Hegel’s idea of the universal interests of society being represented by the state, while he opposed this and saw the state as a separate and alien force that was a mechanism of class oppression that would no longer be required in a classless society.  Its non-repressive functions would no longer be the prerogative of bureaucrats in a body standing apart and on top of society but would be absorbed into it and become the activity of everyone directly involved in those functions.

In this he fought against those socialists who also thought that emancipation would come from outside, including the followers of Proudhon and Robert Owen, who believed that co-operative schemes devised by enlightened reformers would be the workers’ salvation, or those like Blanqui and Weitling for whom freedom would come from the revolutionary conspiracy of an enlightened few.

It is therefore ironic that today so much of what passes for Marxism envisages the state as the embodiment of emancipation with a vanguard that will make the revolution, encapsulated in the slogan that ‘it is the duty of the revolutionary to make the revolution.’  Many of those opposing Marxism and its claim that the working class is the universal class also rely on the capitalist state to enact the end of the particular oppression they oppose.

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 75 – the dictatorship of the proletariat (4)

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Like all organisations, the state’s abiding interest becomes its own preservation and health, which interests are separate from that of society.  So a new society still marked by commodity production, “just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”; it cannot be assumed that the interests of the workers’ state will not be inimical to some degree with that of society–or the working class–as a whole.  It was steps taken by the Paris Commune to address this that received affirmation from Marx and Engels, even if these were incomplete. 

Marx noted that all previous revolutions perfected the state, unlike working class revolution that will seek to break its capitalist form, with the abolition of classes consequently meaning that there is no requirement for its existence–the organisation of the domination of one class by another would become redundant.  The dictatorship of the proletariat would itself disappear as there would be no proletariat.

‘One of the first decisions of the Paris Commune was replacement of the standing army and police.  The Commune made that catch-word of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure—the standing army and State functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at least, is the normal incumbrance and indispensable cloak of class-rule. It supplied the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the “true Republic” was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.’ (Karl Marx The Civil War in France, Collected Works Vol 22 p 334)

What Marx envisaged after the achievement of the political power of the working class was the abolition of the state – as a mechanism of class rule – along with the classes that made it necessary.  This would not happen immediately, but neither did it involve the massive expansion of the state and its role, under the claim that the class struggle would intensify as later claimed by Stalinism.  Instead the rule of the working class would increasingly involve the takeover of functions previously carried out by the state by society itself.

This would take some time; the working class “know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.” (Karl Marx The Civil War in France, Collected Works Vol 22 p 335)

The idea that it is the state that would free the working class was therefore alien to Marx and Engels’ politics, never mind the bloated and parasitic place it had in the Stalinist states of the 20th century.  While the workers’ state would deploy political power to defend the collective property of the working class, like all states it would rest on this form of property itself and upon which the working class would in turn base its social power, with the state subordinated to it, ‘not the master but the servant of society’.  In any other circumstances the view of both men – that the state would die away – would be impossible, something confirmed by the experience of the Stalinism in the following century.

“When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out (Engels Anti-Duhring Vol 25 p268).  The state does not therefore become the agent of transformation but “dies out” as this is achieved.

In some marginal notes, in the form of an imaginary conversation, Marx criticised the book Statism and Anarchy by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, throwing more light on what was meant by abolishing the state:

Bakunin – “If there is a state [gosudarstvo], then there is unavoidably domination [gospodstvo], and consequently slavery. Domination without slavery, open or veiled, is unthinkable — this is why we are enemies of the state.  What does it mean, the proletariat organized as ruling class?”

Marx – “It means that the proletariat, instead of struggling sectionally against the economically privileged class, has attained a sufficient strength and organisation to employ general means of coercion in this struggle. It can however only use such economic means as abolish its own character as salariat, hence as class. With its complete victory its own rule thus also ends, as its class character has disappeared.”

Bakunin – “Will the entire proletariat perhaps stand at the head of the government?”

Marx – “In a trade union, for example, does the whole union form its executive committee? Will all division of labour in the factory, and the various functions that correspond to this, cease? And in Bakunin’s constitution, will all ‘from bottom to top’ be ‘at the top’? Then there will certainly be no one ‘at the bottom’. Will all members of the commune simultaneously manage the interests of its territory? Then there will be no distinction between commune and territory.”

Bakunin – “The Germans number around forty million. Will for example all forty million be member of the government?”

Marx – “Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune.”

Bakunin – “The whole people will govern, and there will be no governed.”

Marx – “If a man rules himself, he does not do so on this principle, for he is after all himself and no other.”

Bakunin – “Then there will be no government and no state, but if there is a state, there will be both governors and slaves.”

Marx – “i.e. only if class rule has disappeared, and there is no state in the present political sense.”

Bakunin – “This dilemma is simply solved in the Marxists’ theory. By people’s government they understand (i.e. Bakunin) the government of the people by means of a small number of leaders, chosen (elected) by the people.”

Marx – “Asine! This is democratic twaddle, political drivel. Election is a political form present in the smallest Russian commune and artel. The character of the election does not depend on this name, but on the economic foundation, the economic situation of the voters, and as soon as the functions have ceased to be political ones, there exists 1) no government function, 2) the distribution of the general functions has become a business matter, that gives no one domination, 3) election has nothing of its present political character.”

(Marx, Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, Collected Works Vol 24, p518-519)

In response to Bakunin’s argument that a worker, once elected to a post, ceases to be a worker and becomes only a bureaucrat seeking his own aggrandisement, Marx refers to “the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory”. A social authority therefore will still exist but with the existence of collective and cooperative relations of production; the end of the need for the suppression of antagonistic class relations and generalised social equality; the political role as performed by the newly formed (and today by the existing capitalist state) will “die out”.  The workers’ state must therefore have a very different dynamic than today’s capitalist one – to shrink and decline rather than expand and grow.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is therefore not a dictatorship in the currently understood sense of that term but is a period of development of society in which the rule of the majority, of the working class, leads to the dying out of the mechanism that makes such a dictatorship possible – the state. The Paris Commune, celebrated by Marx was, he said, a “revolution against the state itself.”

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 74 – the dictatorship of the proletariat (3)

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It is ironic that Marx’s idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is held up as evidence of his authoritarian and oppressive politics when his view was advanced against such conceptions, held by many of his immediate socialist predecessors and contemporaries.  These included such figures as the utopian socialist Saint-Simon, Blanqui, Wilhelm Weitling and Ferdinand Lassalle, who are no longer so well known, but whose views are still the staple of many today who are unaware of their ancestry.

In the previous posts on the book Citizen Marx, we noted that early in his political career he was on the extreme democratic wing of republicanism, and against the constraints on democracy supported by liberalism, going much further in identifying the road to a positive conception of freedom.  The first ‘dictatorship’ championed by him was the dictatorship of democracy in 1848 during the bourgeois revolutions of that year, which the bourgeoisie betrayed.  Such a democratic “dictatorship” would energetically repress any counter-revolution to defend itself from reaction.

For Marx the dictatorship of the proletariat was synonymous with terms that now sound less jarring, such as the ‘political power of the working class’ or the ‘rule of the proletariat’, and meant nothing more nor less than these.  In his book Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold suggests that the various terms Marx used to describe the Paris Commune could also be employed – “Communal Constitution”, “Communal Republic”, “Republic of Labour” and “Social Republic”.  What this entailed was set out in the previous post, most particularly the abolition of classes leading to the abolition of the state, understood by Marx as the mechanism for imposing and defending class rule.

As Engels set out, ‘the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.’ (Engels Introduction to Karl Marx’ s The Civil War in France 1Vol 27 p 190)

Marx ventured some views on how the state would develop that history has confirmed: 

“The bourgeois state is nothing more than the mutual insurance of the bourgeois class against its individual members, as well as against the exploited class, insurance which will necessarily become increasingly expensive and to all appearances increasingly independent of bourgeois society, because the oppression of the exploited class is becoming ever more difficult.”  (Marx, Le Socialisme et l’Impôt, par Emile De Girardin, Collected Works Vol 10 p 333)

Hal Draper, in his third volume of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, entitled The Dictatorship of the Proletariat ventures that ‘Marx’s term ‘rule of the proletariat’ was reformulated as ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ when Marx had to confront the Blanquist mind. (KMTR Vol III p 293).  Draper also notes the comparatively few times – six – that Marx used the term, within two defined periods: 1850–52 and 1871–75.  What matters is that it follows from the idea of a working class political struggle, leading to a working class revolution, and new collective property relations based on the working class.

Draper further states that ‘Not before the “Critique of the Gotha Program” and not after it did Marx ever indicate that the party program should include the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, or any formulation involving the word ‘dictatorship’. (KMTR Vol III, p 305)

We have also seen in the posts on Citizen Marx that Marx and Engels believed that a democratic republic provided the best conditions in which to fight for socialism and was therefore more important to the working class than the bourgeoisie. The latter could, if it had to, have its interests defended by dictatorial political regimes that rested on capitalist property relations, while collective and cooperative property relations are inimical to such political forms.  Whether the form of the bourgeois state was a bourgeois democratic republic or an authoritarian regime, all entailed the dictatorship of the capitalist class in their understanding of the term since the property relations were capitalist and defended by the state.

As The Communist Manifesto put it “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”

“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”

What distinguished Marx’s conception from that of others was that the “dictatorship” was to be one of the proletariat not over it.  As Engels said of one who advanced the latter view:

‘Since Blanqui regards every revolution as a coup de main by a small revolutionary minority, it automatically follows that its victory must inevitably be succeeded by the establishment of a dictatorship—not, it should be well noted, of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who accomplished the coup and who themselves are, at first, organised under the dictatorship of one or several individuals. (Engels, The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune Collected Works Vol 24 p 13)

Emancipation was to be achieved by the working class itself, counterposed to the schemes of the supporters of Blanqui:

‘Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organised men would be able at a given favourable moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by a display of great, ruthless energy, to maintain power until they succeeded in sweeping the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. This involved, above all the strictest, dictatorial centralisation of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government.’  (Engels Introduction to Karl Marx’ s The Civil War in France 1Vol 27 p 188)

This was to be true not only of the workers’ party in relation to society but within the party itself. As Engels put it in a letter in 1890 regarding the German Workers Party: “The biggest party in the empire cannot remain in existence unless every shade of opinion is allowed complete freedom of expression, while even the semblance of dictatorship à la Schweitzer must be avoided.” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works Vol 49 p 11)

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 73 – the dictatorship of the proletariat (2)

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Statue of Karl Marx in Berlin May 4, 2018. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works Vol 24 p 95)

The qualitatively greater degree of freedom to which the dictatorship of the proletariat is directed is explained firstly by Marx’s opposition to the idea of a “free state”:  “Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it, and even today forms of state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the “freedom of the state.”

The mistaken view of the state as the mechanism that can bring about freedom arises from the view that instead “of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own “intellectual, ethical and libertarian bases”. (Critique of the Gotha Programme) This false idea is today more or less widespread among many ‘Marxists’ who champion nationalisation, ‘the public sector’, income redistribution and welfarism, or ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘self-determination’.

The basis of the state under the dictatorship of the proletariat is the development of cooperative economy to the national level and beyond so that society as a whole becomes a cooperative venture consciously moulded to human need by being consciously planned.  Capitalism begins this transition through its socialisation of production but only by raising its contradictions to a higher level while cooperative production begins its positive supersession.

This development within capitalism, however, cannot be adequate or sufficient to achieve its replacement, as Marx explained: “Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate .. by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.” Marx Instructions for the delegates of the Provisional Geneal Council, Collected Works Vol 20 p.)

If the road to socialism can loosely be called rule by the working class Marx explains more clearly the steps which the dictatorship of the proletariat must take upon the conquest of political power (which, to emphasise, is inseparable from social power more generally): “What we are dealing with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.  Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it.”

Marx explains that in these “altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and . . . on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption.” The accumulation of capital by a minority class, and therefore also a class that must work on its behalf, cannot arise, so that with this “abolition of class distinctions all social and political inequality arising from them would disappear of itself.”  (Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works Vol 24 p 96 & 92)

This must lead ultimately “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”

Not only did Marx and Engels put forward this prospectus, but they lived long enough to see an initial attempt to begin it, if only in a very limited fashion – in one city, for a short time, and by an undeveloped working class still short of full consciousness of its task:

“Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. (Engels) “The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule.” (Marx, The Civil War in France, Vol 22 p334)

“ . . the present “spontaneous action of the natural laws of capital and landed property”—can only be superseded by “the spontaneous action of the laws of the social economy of free and associated labour”, by a long process of development of new conditions, as was the “spontaneous action of the economic laws of slavery” and the “spontaneous action of the economical laws of serfdom”. “But they know at the same time that great strides may be taken at once through the Communal form of political organisation and that the time has come to begin that movement for themselves and mankind.” (Marx, The Civil War in France, Vol 22 p491-2)

“Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.” (Marx, The Civil War in France, Vol 22 p334). This “economical emancipation of Labour” was thus to be ‘worked out’ by the working class itself, not by the new state or its governmental executive, but ‘under’ a ‘political form’ that obviously would require organisations of the working class separate from the state, even its own workers’ state to carry out this task..

The new relations of production, which it is the role of the workers’ state to defend, are the means by which the collective and associated labour will develop “by a long process” towards socialism: t”he superseding of the economical conditions of the slavery of labour by the conditions of free and associated labour can only be the progressive work of time.” (Marx, The Civil War in France, Vol 22 p 491)

This, in practice, and not just in theory, demonstrated the wholly democratic credentials of proletarian dictatorship in its earliest form.  In order to avoid bourgeois political corruption, Engels claimed that “the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts—administrative, judicial, and educational—by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies, which were also added in profusion” (Engels, postscript to The Civil War in France, Collected Works Vol 27 p190)

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Another brutal lesson on imperialism

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The attack on Venezuela and Trump’s declaration that the US is going to run the country is about as naked a demonstration of imperialism as one can get.  It is also a crystal clear expression of the new ‘multipolar’ world order that many on the far right and on the left have supported.  You think not?  Do you think the ‘multipolar’ world will not have a pole that includes United States imperialism?

The dust has hardly settled before speculation on future attacks on Cuba and Iran.  Apparently the one on Venezuela was held back because Trump wanted to bomb Nigeria first. Under the cover of the latest events the Brits and French bombed Syria while the war in Ukraine drags on amid European forecasts of war with Russia in a few years.

The nauseating assent by the leaders of European imperialism was displayed by agreed statements that so reeked of hypocrisy that they would have been better to say nothing.  We support international law but it’s great that Maduro was ousted and can we now please have peaceful regime change! What will they do if Trump decides he would like Greenland?

The plea for peace is not without self-interest.  The European leaders know that their own legitimacy is undermined by naked US aggression, and at a time when for many people their support for genocide in Palestine already damns them.  It further isolates them not only from their own populations but also from the rest of the world and places a question mark over how they can find a way out of it while preventing total subordination to the United States.

The attack on Venezuela is also an attack on Chinese and Russian interests as both are heavily invested in the current regime, both politically and economically, with Trump making it plain in his own vulgar way that it’s about oil.  Control of the world’s greatest reserves would weaken the power of Russian ownership, the supply to China, and permit lower risk in attacking Iran.  So, no one thinks the attack on Venezuela is simply about Venezuela.

Yet that is how much of the left behaves.  As I wrote in a post nearly a week ago, ‘it seems to think European imperialism is the alternative to US imperialism, which used to be the alternative to Russian imperialism.’  This is illustrated in its solidarity with the Ukrainian state, which is supported by European imperialism, to take the place (or rather to complement) that of the US. Ukraine proclaims its support for European imperialism in return, and seeks to lock it and the US into a formal alliance far into the future.  This left thinks it can support Ukraine in its alliance with European imperialism while it also seeks the continuation of US support, and at the same time defend Venezuela by opposing the same US imperialism and the European assent for its aggression!

It thinks it can pick and choose what imperialism to support in each conflict; now defending the intervention of European imperialism in Ukraine while damning its hypocrisy over Venezuela; damning US imperialism today while supporting its intervention in Ukraine a year ago and seeking it to continue, while still absolving it of any responsibility for the war starting in the first place.  It is wilfully blind to the accumulation of conflicts and wars, of which Ukraine is just one, that discloses a World conflict and presages a World War that will involve every imperialist power.

The myopia is admitted when they state that the war in Ukraine will only become an inter-imperialist one once Western troops are directly fighting on the ground.  Do they not know that this is already happening? In which case, how many will there have to be for them to recognise it?

Imperialism is not a feature derived from individual states, governments or regimes but of the imperatives of the international accumulation of capital and the irreconcilable competition it involves. It is this that destroys the illusions that ‘multipolarity’ is a step forward; as if the development of new and stronger imperialist powers is good because it weakens the older ones.  The left suffers a derangement of ‘anti-imperialism’, which prescribes an arbitrary checklist to allow the surrender of working class political independence to support for one or other imperialist pole.

And just as this ‘anti-imperialism’ allows one to un-recognise one or other imperialism, so does it prevent one from recognising what isn’t, and therefore what is, socialism.  It’s a long time since many declared illusions in Venezuelan or Chavez ‘socialism’ and the current Maduro regime lacks legitimacy, although it now exceeds anything that Trump could attempt to put in place.

There is no insuperable obstacle to the existing regime being made to accommodate US interests but the demand to allow the US to ‘run’ the country is certainly one of them.  It is not possible to achieve this, and Trump’s limited action may betray some dim awareness of it, while his dismissal of the main opposition leader reveals the weakness of any of his plans.  The Venezuelan regime may or may not seek to cut a deal although Trump may stupidly seek more than he can get if recent history is any guide.

We have been told that US policy is pivoting away from Asia and towards its own hemisphere but even this involves global geopolitical consequences, as we have seen, and does so because imperialist competition encompasses the globe.  Whoever fails to see this has not learned the first thing from two world wars.  In any case, it is very doubtful that the new US national security strategy means any such thing.

The absence of the working class from the global class struggle has allowed many on the left to pick one imperialist camp against another, with further delusions that they are fighting campism!  The failure to establish the political basis on which the working class should take a stand means that we have leftists in my own country opposing Irish NATO membership, and the presence of British rule in the north of the country, while supporting the Ukrainian state, which currently declares the absolute necessity for a NATO-like agreement and for the presence of British and French troops on the ground as part of its ‘solution’.

The attack on Venezuela is widely accepted by the left as an exercise by imperialism that will have a worldwide impact but much of it currently displays no coherent understanding of the reason for these consequences, never mind a consistent policy to oppose it.

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 72 – the dictatorship of the proletariat (1)

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In a previous post I noted Marx’s statement that 

‘Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. That the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.’ (Marx letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, Marx Collected Works Vol 39, p62 & 65)

If we quote Lenin on this, he puts it in his typically forthright way:

‘The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the fundamental question of the modern working-class movement in all capitalist countries without exception… Whoever has failed to understand that dictatorship is essential to the victory of any revolutionary class has no understanding of the history of revolutions, or else does not want to know anything in this field.’ – Lenin, “A Contribution to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship”.

‘Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie.’

‘Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested’. (Lenin, The State and Revolution.)

It is almost universal that when introducing this question, it is felt necessary to explain what is meant by the word “dictatorship”.  The feeling is justified. The history of Stalinist regimes that repudiated the common understanding of (bourgeois) democracy has made these statements appear as early political endorsement of later practice. This explanation of its meaning is ahistorical, and it is necessary to present the very different understanding of the term as it was understood by Marx.

This usually starts by noting that the word ‘dictatorship’ has a long history, going back to the ancient Roman Republic, denoting various specific political ideas that are not the same as the current conception of it – as a form of government in which absolute power is exercised by a dictator, or as signifying absolute, imperious, or overbearing power or control.  Like so many other political or philosophical thinkers, terms routinely employed by Marx often have a specific meaning which it is necessary to know to correctly understand his work.  In Marx’s case the use of the word dictatorship during his time was not confined to him and was widely understood.

For Marx it denoted not the overthrown or denial of democracy but its achievement, as put forward in The Communist Manifesto, which he generally subscribed to for the rest of his life:

“We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” In doing so “the working class can not simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police bureaucracy, and judicature for its own purposes.’

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto)

The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore refers to the period after the working class achieves political power, so that this power becomes that of the majority.  At this time Marx set out that the state would lead this process, but he subsequently emphasised the working class itself carrying out this task, initially through the growth of workers cooperatives and then through their forming a national (and international) cooperative economy.  This would be distinguished not so much by its planning as by the governance and control by the working class. (See note below)

Subsequent history has demonstrated that without this working class control socialism cannot be built, which is in many ways a truism, since socialism is (loosely) the name for the working class becoming the ruling class.  History also confirms Marx’s analysis of the position of the state: ‘the government machine or the state insofar as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labour.’ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works Vol 24 p 96)

In creating this ‘dictatorship’, society is radically changed and the previous economic and political power of the capitalist class – through their ownership and control of the means of production defended by the instrument of the state – is replaced by that of cooperative ownership and a state machinery, composed of workers, and controlled by the working class as a whole.  

Note: ‘That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionise the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present cooperative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the governments or of the bourgeois’. (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works Vol 24 p 93-4)

Back to part 71

Forward to part 73

Standing Firm with Western Imperialism

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There comes a point in political argument in which the least effective argument is the most appropriate – that you quote the opponent’s own words as admissions.  However, given it’s their own words they are unlikely to revoke them. We have long since past this point in dealing with the supporters of Ukraine and its alliance with Western imperialism.  It’s doubtful that even while calling for it they will admit its existence.

The existence of a proxy imperialist war might also seem obvious given the hundreds of billions of dollars given to Ukraine in the shape of weapons and financing, with unprecedented sanctions, not to mention intelligence support and special forces on the ground, and much else besides.  Yet this too is denied, despite the repeated declarations of both Western leaders and Ukraine that they are fighting for each other – what do they know?

Instead, it is declared that this unprecedented level of support to Ukraine is less than ‘the full international assistance they deserve’, despite the stocks of western arms running embarrassingly low and exposing its military weakness.  It speaks of a ‘Trump-Putin axis’, but is Trump selling weapons to Russia or Ukraine and is he imposing sanctions on Ukraine or Russia?  Who does the US provide military intelligence to?  Does it allow its satellites to spy on Ukrainian positions for the Russians, or on Russian positions for the Ukrainians?

The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign denounces what it calls ‘neo-colonial plunder’ by this axis.  But who supported the intervention of western imperialism in the first place?  Who said this was a good idea? Who said it knew that western imperialist intervention was for its ‘own interests’.  What on earth did it think these interests were?  And still it calls for its yet greater intervention!

Now it seems to think European imperialism is the alternative to US imperialism, which used to be the alternative to Russian imperialism.  Unfortunately, it believes that European imperialism has fallen for ‘Trump’s deception’ and ‘delayed autonomous European action that could effectively help Ukraine . . .’  But if Starmer, Macron and Merz are not the answer, who is?  Who’s more anti-Russian than this lot?

What about the Ukrainians themselves?  We have been told repeatedly to respect their ‘agency’, except it is Trump that is now blamed for the ‘neo-colonial plunder disguised as sovereignty [that] entrenches Russian occupation, excludes the occupied from governance, and blocks any possibility of reversing Russia’s conquests.’  Not much room for Ukrainian agency there it would seem.

And this is not the only example of the supporters of Ukraine overlooking Ukrainian agency (consciously or unconsciously).  The hundreds of thousands of deserters, who don’t want to die, are routinely ignored, as are the hundreds of thousands of young men avoiding forced conscription by emigrating, or by running away, or fighting with army recruitment teams that try to snatch them off the street.

What do they think of the Ukrainian agency of those who fight with the Russians?  Or about the millions (variously estimated) who have moved to Russia?  Do they really believe everyone in the Russian occupied areas of the Donbas and Crimea are loyal citizens of Ukraine who wish to return to the tender embraces of the regime in Kyiv?

And what of other Ukrainian agency expressed in the growing role of ethno-nationalism, with its suppression of the Russian language and Russia-aligned Orthodox church?  Or the rampant corruption that they, along with the western media, purposely downplay?  Are these too not expressions of ‘Ukrainian agency’?  Or does the sanctity of Ukraine not involve this messy reality of the real world?

The pro-war left is incapable of integrating all this into its simple story of support for the fight against Russian aggression because its cause is that of the Ukrainian state itself, and it is precisely the Ukrainian state that deserters do not want to die for.  It is the state that many emigrants want to leave behind and many young men dread being beaten up by and sent to the front to become meat for first person drones.  It is the Ukrainian state that is rotten with corruption; that seeks to suppress the rights of Russian speakers and adherents of the church.  It is the Ukrainian armed forces that is full of neo-Nazi units to whom the Jewish President presents medals, absolved by the pro-war left in the West because he’s Jewish and these things can’t actually be happening.

Yet Ukrainian agency miraculously returns when it comes to the possibility that Ukraine can win the war – ‘we reject Trump and Putin’s lie of inevitable Ukrainian defeat or imminent frontline collapse. The difficulties Ukraine faces are manufactured by the failure of others to provide necessary aid.’  Presumably yet more arms must be sent to Ukraine even while the state finds it more and more difficult to find Ukrainians to use them and much of the aid goes missing.  Why doesn’t the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign not support Starmer’s and Macron’s plans to get British and French troops into the country? Or is that too obviously imperialist?

The left distinguishes itself not by its proclaiming an independent working class position but by trumpeting the cause of the Ukrainian state louder than anyone else.  In doing so it abandons everything it thought it stood for.  It makes clear its objective of defending the ‘sovereignty’ of the Ukrainian state, forgetting that sovereignty of the capitalist state is what must be opposed and that this principle of ‘national sovereignty’ brings it full circle back to the pro-Russian left that also proclaims national sovereignty as its first concern.

Ukraine is an independent capitalist state: not a colony and not an oppressed nation.  If there is a national question it is the Russian-aligned population that the Ukrainian state has considered a problem of terrorism since 2014.  And if there is a national question the war has demonstrated that no variety of nationalism is the solution – Ukrainian or Russian.

‘Self-determination’ for Ukraine, championed by the pro-Ukraine left, is simply the demand that the decisions of the regime in Kyiv be enacted – the ‘sovereignty’ of the state to be respected. The restoration of ‘freedom of choice’ can only mean defence of the Kyiv regime’s policy of joining NATO and rebuilding its armed forces to 800,000, bigger than it currently has and impossible for the bankrupt country to afford..

This has nothing to do with socialism and directs the Ukrainian working class into the hands of the increasingly corrupt Kyiv regime; a choice more and more Ukrainians are voting against with their feet.  The Western left parrots the demands of the most rabid neocons in Washington and discredited leaders in Europe, pushing an agenda that can only mean fighting to the last Ukrainian.

The pro-war left has created a world in which Western imperialism (now shorn of the United States because Trump is in charge) is fighting ‘against authoritarianism and fascism’ in opposition to Russia and China, which between them is supposedly leading the threat to ‘global democracy’, whatever that is.

Forget about the world being divided into classes.  Forget about class struggle and the fight for socialism.  The war in Ukraine is presented as a struggle for ‘global democracy’ and supporting the Ukrainian state is the litmus test.  Forget that this democracy is a capitalist democracy and that Ukraine is a debased example of it.  Forget that only now, with Trump, is the US its enemy, and forget that presumably Genocide Joe was on the right side of the struggle before him.

Forget that even if all of this was true, the response of socialists would not be to unite with one imperialism against the other but to seek a workers’ united front against both.  Forget the lessons of the Popular fronts of the 1930s; they look progressive compared to a putative alliance with Zelenskyy, Starmer, Macron, von der Leyen and Lindsay Graham etc. 

As the US has demonstrated, imperialism can shift from ‘democratic’ to authoritarian forms quickly and with relative ease, especially when part of its ‘opposition’ claims it can play a progressive role.  The character of the state, and workers’ opposition to it, is not determined fundamentally by its form but by its nature.  Not its governmental style or model ,but by its essential class character. The idea that Starmer, von der Leyen and assorted US neocons are democratic alternatives that the working class must stand beside is to have surrendered all understanding gained by being a socialist.  In the midst of a genocide in Palestine – that all of them have supported – such a view is criminal and unforgivable.

As Trotsky once said: “I can give counsel only to the workers. My counsel to them is not to believe for a single instant that the war of the two imperialist camps can bring anything else but oppression and reaction in both camps. It will be the war of the slave-owners who cover themselves with various masks: “democracy,” “civilization,” on the one hand, “race,” “honour,” on the other. Only the overthrow of all slave-owners can once for all end the war and open an epoch of true civilization.”

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 71

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Marx states in ‘The Communist Manifesto’: ‘In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed . . . Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants . . . The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.’

‘The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie . . . At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so.’

‘. . . but with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more . . .  The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts.’

‘Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle.’

‘This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.’ 

‘Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.’

‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.’

‘The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.’

Marx goes on to set out the tasks of the working class revolution, which involves ‘the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.’ This revolution is not an eschatological thunderstrike out of the blue that suddenly transforms the world but a juncture arising within existing society through the development of its contradictions.

As a conscious process of real people, it cannot be the outcome of impetuous and spontaneous apprehension, but must arise from the considered and passionate commitment of the vast majority of the working class, arising from the history and development of their struggles as a class.

We can note at least three aspects of what Marx said that has obvious relevance to today.  The first is ‘the growing competition among the bourgeois’, which now takes place between previously inconceivably large corporations that span the globe that makes this competition an international phenomenon.  This both unites the interests of the world working class and divides it according to the strength of the capitalist system and political weakness of the working class.

The second is the the improved means of communication that can help ‘in the ever expanding union of the workers.’ We no longer need to merely read about wars but have daily, if not hourly, video coverage of its barbarity in Gaza and Ukraine.  What the working class movement has failed abysmally to do is to create its own international media, which remains in Lilliputian proportions in comparison to that of the bourgeoisie.

Through this media the bourgeoisie is compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena.  Hence the bias in coverage of the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine.  Unfortunately again, we see the weakness of the working class movement that is happy to wallow in the lies about the imperialist character of the proxy war in Ukraine and line up behind its own ruling class.  The very saturation of the media allows those comfortable in this position to have their deception confirmed again and again.  A working class media would at least allow a wider source of information and debate, although again, such is the degeneration of much of the current left that petty bourgeois moralism is employed to silence critical voices.

In previous posts, we noted one result of such moralism in the call to hate capitalism more as a spur and guide to action.  We argued in response that a revolution conceived out of ‘negativity’ and ‘hate’, even if it is born out of oppression and exploitation, is utterly insufficient.  Such a view faces the problem of how such a social revolution could become the long-term goal of the working class and could be achieved by it.

Miéville, for example, can say that ‘capitalism is unbearable and yet, mostly, it’s borne’, resulting from the success of ‘capitalist-realist common sense that it’s impossible, even laughable, to struggle or hope for change.’  In part he puts this down ‘to a deliberate ruling-class propaganda strategy to discourage any belief in any such possibility’, but ‘also, at a base level, because it’s so difficult to think beyond the reality in which one has been created, lives and thinks now . . . conditioned as we are by existing reality, we cannot prefigure or simply ‘imagine’ such radical alterity.’

The result is that ‘it’s beyond our ken – we can only yearn for it, glimpse some sense of betterness out of the corner of the eye.’ (A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, p 89)

Such is the idealist view of the possibility of social revolution that cannot ground the future society from the current one but sees the current in purely, or at least mainly, decisively and definitively, in negative terms for which the appropriate emotion is hate.  This is why he states that ‘it’s so difficult to think beyond the reality’ when it is precisely this reality, clearly seen – not out of the corner of the eye – that provides the grounds for the social revolution, giving rise to the appropriate emotions of hope and courage derived from passionate belief in the cause, with hatred of oppression as a motivation but not determining the struggle.

This reality, according to Marx, includes the development of the forces of capitalist production and the associated relations of production that include the creation, expansion, development, organisation and growing consciousness of the working class.  The prosecution of this class struggle involves the creation of a mass, political working class movement that demonstrates not only its power to increasingly defend the interests of the working class but its potential to lead to the creation of a new society ruled by it.

This alternative is built upon the conditions and circumstances of the real world and not by thinking a prefigured ‘radical alterity’ – some largely imagined future alternative – but by changing this reality through prosecuting the class struggle, ranging from the creation of democratic and militant trade unions, to workers’ cooperatives and their association with each other, to the creation of mass working class parties committed to socialism.  The forces recognised by Marx that governed the development of the working class still exist today and are the grounds for the concomitant development of socialist politics.

Back to part 70

Forward to part 72

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (6 of 6)

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The most damning judgements in Fragments are that the movements since 2008 ‘failed to identify an avenue through which society might be changed’; ‘it is unlikely the Trotskyist People before Profit will manage to articulate a viable alternative . . . and the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before. The radical left ‘were engaged in a form of politics incapable of realising its own aims.’  (p183, 191, 192 & 181)

The left made gains during the years covered by the book, expressed in some relatively modest electoral successes, but this was achieved though pursuit of a strategy and practice that might be considered as one of least resistance, which had inevitable shortcomings and meant these ‘steps’ were not an ‘avenue through which society might be changed’; entailed a lack of articulation of ‘a viable alternative’; lacked clarity over how to achieve ‘the long-term goal of socialism’ and gave rise to the perception that its politics was ‘incapable of realising its own aims.’

This is not only a question of an absence of a revolutionary socialist programme, which we have already noted in previous posts.  The left has worked under the assumption that achievement of  its objectives requires a revolutionary party, which alone would understand the necessity for revolution and how it may be achieved, and that in its various forms it is the nucleus of this party, which is considered to be revolutionary because its leaders truly believe in revolution (regardless of how it looks from outside).  This obviously means that its own activity and building its own organisations are the absolute priority.

I am reminded of the slogan that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution, except socialist revolutions are not primarily made by revolutionaries but by the working class in its great majority.  The emancipation of the working class can be the work only of the working class itself, as someone famous once said.  This is one of many principles widely acknowledged but without understanding what it entails.  Revolutionaries are ‘the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class . . . which pushes forward all others [with] the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.’ (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto).

The working class party is built not solely or even mainly by the activists of the left but mainly by the working class itself, with the socialist movement playing the role just mentioned.  Instead, the mantra of building the party is reduced to building the existing left organisations not as a consequence of the development of mass working class movements but separate from them.  Revolutionary organisations can only develop if they find within the working class this growth of socialist consciousness, which is itself partly a result of their own activity but only as an integral part of the struggles of the working class itself.

We have noted the need to challenge the existing leadership of the trade union movement as an example of what is needed to begin addressing these tasks. We have noted that the limits of single issue campaigns means that they were not a substitute, however useful they may be otherwise, and that the political education that was given was the failed statist politics that subordinates the class’s own activity to that of the capitalist state. This view has come to dominate understanding of what ‘socialism’ is and reflects the historical domination of social-democracy and Stalinism.

This was rudely demonstrated by the left’s customary call for nationalisation being appropriated by the state in relation to the banking system when it faced collapse; which was carried out to protect both capitalist ownership and itself, while dumping the cost on the working class.  I have seen it defended on the grounds that this was not ‘socialist’ nationalisation, but this complaint just admits its unavoidably capitalist character.  Could capitalist state ownership be anything other than capitalist? How could the capitalist state introduce working class control and ownership when it was its own ownership that was asserted?

Progress through the lines of least resistance does not necessarily involve conscious opportunism, precisely because it does involve progress, but like all opportunism it sacrifices long term principle for short term gains. Gains which can more readily dissolve as circumstances change and change they always do.  The approach of appearing more ‘practical’ and attuned to workers’ existing consciousness by declaring that one can leverage the state to do what the workers movement itself must do, through a ‘left government’ for example, does not educate, in fact miseducates, the working class.

This does not invalidate the struggle for reforms that of necessity are under the purview of the state, but these are of benefit not only, or so much, for their direct effects but for their arising from the agency of the working class through the struggle to impose its will on the state and capitalist class.  Reforms are ultimately required to create the best conditions for a strong workers’ movement, and not as solutions to their problems that act to co-opt workers to dependence on the state.  Handed down from above they can primarily be seen as performing the latter role. 

The alternative of seeking to mobilise workers when their organisations are bureaucratised and the majority are either apathetic or antipathetic, is often seen as less practical, less advised, and ‘ultra-left’.  However, the point of socialist argument and agitation is often not with the expectation of eliciting immediate action but to advance political consciousness, which sometimes might be seen as widening what is called the ‘Overton window’.

This approach addresses the argument that only in revolutionary times or circumstances can one advance revolutionary demands.  All independent action by the working class is a step towards its own emancipation, no matter how small, just as reliance on the state is not.  Reforms won from the state are significant such steps if they involve independent organisation of the workers’ movement to achieve them.  As Marx said in the Communist Manifesto in relation to workers’ struggles: ‘Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers.’

Something similar was pointed out by James Connolly, who knew that temporary victories would not yield permanent peace until permanent victory was achieved, and that for such victories ‘the spirit, the character, the militant spirit, the fighting character of the organisation, was of the first importance.’ Fragments’ statements that the left ‘failed to lay deep social roots’ and ‘failed to develop a mass political consciousness’ is the authors judgement that this didn’t happen.

It is banal and trite to acknowledge that demands need to be appropriate to their circumstances, but this must also encompass two considerations.  First, that even in situations in which it is almost impossible to achieve the working class mobilisation that is required, it may still also be necessary to say what must be done in order to achieve the desired outcome.

Second, only by always putting forward an independent working class position, which most often does not involve any call to more or less immediate revolutionary overthrow, is it possible for workers to begin to realise that an independent working class politics exists that has something to say about all the immediate and fundamental issues of the day.  As I have previously noted, this begins by instilling in workers the conception of their own position and power as a class, not that of an amorphous ‘people’.  What this involves in any particular circumstance is a political question and the subject of polemical differences that are unfortunately unavoidable.

The fall of the Celtic Tiger demonstrated that such crises on their own will not bring about the development of socialist consciousness – that capitalism is crisis-ridden and must be replaced by a society ruled by the working class.  One of the earliest posts on this blog noted evidence that these crises most often do not.  In order that they deliver such object lessons it is necessary for a critical mass of the working class to already be convinced that their power is the alternative to capitalism and its crises.  This requires a prior significant socialist movement integral to working class life and its organisations.

We are a long way away from this, with one reviewer of the book in The Irish Times noting that its editors had excessive optimism about the experience of the Irish Left over the period.  The reviewer makes other comments that are apposite.  The argument of this review is that the book records enough experience to show that optimism is unjustified, at least on the basis of continuation of the political approach recorded by it.

The project of a left government that would be dominated by Sinn Fein, with secondary roles for the Labour Party, Social Democrats and Greens is not the road to address the failures noted at the top of the post.  The project is a chimera that is incoherent and cannot work.  In (un)certain circumstances it might spur a further development of consciousness and independent working class organisation and activity, but this is by far the less likely outcome and is not, in any case, what is being argued by the projects’ left supporters.

The left is always in a hurry, partly because of the preponderance of young people involved but more decisively because of the project itself, which is not based on building the strength and consciousness of the class as a whole but of building the left organisations themselves, particularly through elections.  The next one is always the most vital.  The former is the work of years and decades to which the project of ‘party building’ and ‘the immediacy of revolution’, understood as insurrection, does not lend itself.  These are outcomes that cannot be willed by socialists but determined ultimately by the wider class struggle and the decisions of countless workers as well as by their enemies.

Elections allow socialists ‘a gauge for proportioning our action such as cannot be duplicated, restraining us from untimely hesitation as well as from untimely daring’, and ‘a means, such as there is no other, of getting in touch with the masses of the people that are still far removed from us, of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions.’  It is not a means to arrive at a government that is ‘left’ of the current bourgeois duopoly but right of socialism, and that peddles illusions that the current capitalist form of democracy can deliver fundamental change.

Back to part 5

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (5 of 6)

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Fragments makes a series of observations about the political consciousness of the Irish working class, some of which we have already noted, such as the view of many on the Labour Party entering office that ‘the crisis was clearly not their fault and . . . the harsh austerity measures they took were seen as both forced by the Troika and, while painful, necessary.

It records the view of another author that the first year of crisis saw a large number of demonstrations but these ‘dried up once the public realised the magnitude of the banking crisis, and they were replaced by years of “muted protest”. Certainly, there was a sense of powerlessness at the scale and suddenness of the economic crash, a degree of acceptance of the official narrative . . .’ (p31)

It notes that the muting of protest was partially the result of emigration, particularly of the young with 106,000 leaving from 2009 to 2013.  ‘However, the muting of opposition was also due to the influence of the Labour Party and trade unions, which contained protest and channelled anti-government anger down institutional routes from 2009 to 2011.’ (p30). These organisations did indeed push anger down the road of inevitable failure, and yes, they were betrayed, but how was this possible?

One contributor notes that by late 2013 ‘it is difficult to overstate the feeling of exhaustion and disillusionment’, with the radical left ‘comprehensively defeated on the one anti-austerity struggle they’d seriously fought – household taxes.’ The ‘public mood was judged sullen but compliant’ and was successfully ‘blackmailed’ into voting yes to the EU’s fiscal Treaty in 2012 ‘even though this treaty restricted the possibility of future government spending” (p 40-41)

I wrote about this result at the time, noting that:  ‘At 60 per cent Yes against 40 per cent No there is no room for doubt.  It is a decisive endorsement of government policy and a mandate for further cuts and tax increases.  The result should not have been unexpected given the political forces ranged in support of the Treaty, the support of big and small business, the failure of the trade union movement to oppose it and the inevitable support of the mass media.  In the general election last year the Irish people voted by a large majority for a new government in no important way different from the previous one and with no claim to pursue significantly different policies.’

I also noted that ‘Austerity isn’t popular despite the vote and never will be.  Even the Yes campaign was under instructions not to celebrate its victory . . . In October last year when the Austerity Treaty was originally being negotiated an opinion poll recorded 63 per cent opposed to it with only 37 per cent supporting.’  I noted that some people had changed their minds or perhaps did not have the confidence to follow through on their opposition.  This might have united around the demand to repudiate the debt taken on by the state on behalf of the banks and their bondholders, but this also meant opposition to the Troika upon whom the state had become reliant.  It also meant opposition to the administration in the US, even though its Secretary to the Treasury Timothy Geithner thought it was ‘stupid’ to guarantee the banks liabilities. 

I wrote a number of blogs on the issue of repudiating the debt here, here and here, and the disastrous and ‘stupid’ decision to bail out the bondholders in the first place.  Doing so was a real political challenge and required an alternative that didn’t exist.  Without this the failure of the opposition to austerity was inevitable, even if the question of the debt was only one element of the necessary political alternative.

Where the book completely fails is the neglect of what the political content of the alternative might have been, although this is revealing.  In recording the activity of the left its non-appearance reflects the absence of this in the anti-austerity movement as a whole and the failure to win any significant section of it to a socialist perspective.

The same contributor noted above goes on to say that at a later time ‘A proper balance sheet would recognise how the Labour Party and the aligned section of the union movement were rendered powerless to influence or sidetrack the anti-austerity movement.’ (p 42). He points to the drop on the Labour vote from 19 per cent in the 2011 general election to 7 per cent in the 2014 local elections and the ‘victory for left-wing independents and Trotskyist parties alike.’ (p 43)

He argues this was possible because in 2014 100,000 marched against water charges in October followed by 150,000–200,000 in November and 80,000 (in Dublin alone) in December in what was ultimately a winning struggle.  We have already noted the limp role that was expected of the trade unions and political parties in the campaign in the previous posts but the argument that the Labour Party and trade union leaders could not divert the campaign is correct.

It won because it was a community campaign based on mass protests, blocking the installation of water meters and non-payment of bills.  Independents and left wing candidates benefited from their role in the campaign which also distinguished itself by exposing the equivocating role of Sinn Fein. Despite the political weaknesses of the campaign that we noted previously its tactics were able to beat the counter-measures of the government where the previous campaign against household charges could not.

The campaign proved that individual campaigns, given the right circumstances, could defeat particular austerity measures even where the wider offensive was continued successfully. It should be recalled that the water charges campaign took off almost a year after the state exited the Troika bailout programme. It is also worth recording again the failure to draw the right political lessons as the trade union official who contributed the chapter on the campaign finishes his story by endorsing the statement by ‘one of the world’s greatest authorities on water’ that:

‘The Irish system of paying for water and sanitation services through progressive taxation and non-domestic user fees, is an exemplary model of fair equitable and sustainable service delivery for the entire world.’ (p 61)

In fact, the Irish water industry was wasteful and inefficient and state ownership is neither democratic nor socialist.  For this, workers’ cooperative ownership or the demand for workers’ control would have been necessary but the Irish left, like so much in the rest of the world, have become habituated to statist views of socialism that Marx repudiated but that have become entrenched through the domination of social democracy and Stalinism over the last one hundred years.

With such a political platform the problem of the state being the solution, when the solvency and policy of the state was the problem, was once again avoided because doing otherwise would raise the question of ownership and control that would show the platform’s inadequacy.

The main victory in Fragments of Victory was thus necessarily limited and could not be a springboard to address the many deficiencies of the resistance identified in the book.  These included the failure ‘to build lasting political and social institutions’ and ‘no lasting form of working-class self-organisation.’  Reliance on capitalist state ownership as ‘an exemplary model’  illustrates why a problem could not be addressed: that ‘the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before.’ (p192)

The view that the trade union bureaucracy was ‘rendered powerless to influence or sidetrack the anti-austerity movement’ is therefore only partially true. The politics of the bureaucracy, and of the Labour Party, were not challenged by a wider political alternative and the much-trumpeted militant tactics of the campaign were no substitute for it.

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