INTERNASYONALISMO

Convincing workers that capitalism is in their best interest is not the central purpose of most ruling class ideology. With rare historical exceptions, workers find the prosaic reality of capitalism with its exploitation and dehumanisation too obvious in their daily lives to ever be truly convinced of this. Instead, bourgeois ideology focuses on making their system, however imperfect, seem to be the only possible one. All others are presented as either being even worse or hopelessly "utopian". Winston Churchill’s famous aphorism, "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried" could be said to sum up this main thrust of bourgeois ideology.

History, we are told, is littered with the failures of those who want to establish ‘heaven on earth’. Such people are either good-intentioned but touchingly-naïve fools who want to deny ‘human nature’ or dangerous fanatics who will shrink from no atrocity in their efforts to bring about their ‘paradise’.

Communism and ‘Human Nature’

Humans, we are told, are simply imperfect creatures. We lie, cheat, steal, exploit our brothers and sisters, fight horrendous wars, and kick the neighbour’s puppy for no good reason other than that we can. A society based on a view of human nature that denies these facts is simply a non-starter.

For communists, however, there is another fundamental side to human nature. The human species is a social one at root and branch and every activity we carry out has a social dimension. Ties of solidarity bind us together at multiple levels and affect us at the deepest levels of our psyche. Without the company of our fellow human beings we quickly deteriorate psychologically and loneliness (that is, a lack of satisfying emotional relationships) has as much a detrimental effect on human happiness as poverty and deprivation. In the most profound sense, an isolated human being is actually something less than human: a man alone is not a man.

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the relations of exploitation that arose with class stratification distort this social nature. The presence of an exploiting class that is driven to maintain its rule through oppression undermines the relations of solidarity upon which all societies depend. The exploited suffer under the whip of the taskmaster, while the exploiters are tormented by repressed guilt at their position in society. A class society cannot, by definition, truly satisfy the needs, material or psychological, of its members.

These contradictions express themselves in both the material and ideological arena and are internalised within the psychic composition of each member of society. The anti-social behaviour of some elements represents the working out of these contradictions in practical form. Whether a thief steals to feed his starving family or through some perverse inner compulsion, the root of this behaviour is found within the fault-lines of class society and the psychological torment inflicted upon its members.

Human beings have lived with class society for a long time and the scars of this social development are now so deeply rooted that it must seem to many to be a part of human nature. But we must never forget that class society itself is relatively recent in humanity’s evolutionary history.

The majority of our species history was spent living in communal relationships without exploitation and without a state. Despite their limited scope, the very existence of the prehistoric societies demonstrates that exploitation is not an inevitable consequence of human nature. The dim memory and yearning for this way of life and attendant psychological wholeness is found, albeit highly mythologized, in many of the creation myths of ancient religions. From the Golden Age of Greek Mythology to the idyllic hunter-gatherer state of Adam and Eve in the Judeo-Christian canon, humanity has ever looked back to its communist origins. These origins, moreover, are seen as the ‘natural state’ of humanity before it ‘fell from grace’, something to be valued and cherished. In these ancient myths, which represent the earliest dawning of consciousness, it is in fact class society that is unnatural, so much so that its appearance has to be explained by the action of cosmic forces dwarfing humanity!

Even as the grip of class society tightened upon humanity, communism has never lost its fascination. In every age, in every society the exploited masses have longed for the return of this halcyon period. As an example, for the early Christians, it wasn’t simply enough to wait passively until Christ re-established Eden - their communities attempted to express this perceived truth in practical form, by holding all things in common. This radical current is to be found throughout the history of Christianity as well as other religions which, despite its alienated and idealised form, expresses a counterpoint to all those who point to history’s tragic procession of wars and massacres.

And paradoxically, even the phenomenon of war itself expresses the contradictions of human nature in class society - this slaughter of thousands, even millions of fellow human beings is accompanied by deep expressions of bravery, solidarity and compassion.

The view of ‘human nature’ appealed to by the bourgeoisie is thus a distorted one that, while containing elements of truth, ignores the full import of human thought and behaviour throughout history. To say it is ‘human nature’ to exploit others is, in the sweep of history, no more profound an observation than saying it is ‘human nature’ to live peaceably. Both can be true in certain circumstances.

Decadent Capitalism: The Living Negation of Humanity

What, then, are the circumstances facing humanity today? What is their import for the communist project?

In 1914, the clearest revolutionary currents considered that capitalism had exhausted its capacity for improving human society. Although capitalism had always been a society based on exploitation and inflicted a new level of alienation upon human society, it was still able, initially at least, to play a progressive role for humanity.

Its earliest stirrings were accompanied by a tremendous advancement in the areas of philosophy, allowing society to begin to criticise the religious and superstitious modes of thought that had now become a fetter on the development of human thought. Science also took dramatic leaps forwards while the toiling masses were mobilised by radical ideas of democracy and freedom. Despite the new exploitation, the living standards of those incorporated into the new system slowly began to rise, albeit as much as the result of ferocious class struggle as any natural inclination on the part of capitalism or its new ruling class.

Signs that this progress was beginning to come to end, at least in Europe, were appearing as early as 1870 but capitalism still had tremendous fields for advancement in the New World and elsewhere. Advancement in many fields, especially science and the economy, in fact continued to accelerate although at the cultural level, signs of decline were beginning to appear. Tensions began to rise between the great powers as each state’s need to expand began to conflict with those of others. Philosophical progress began to retreat and the ruling class began to seek comfort once again in the superstitions and cults that it had thrown off in its youth.

In 1914, these tensions exploded and the First World War began. It was a disaster unprecedented in the entire history of humanity to that point, all the more poignant because it was not the random strike of disease or natural disaster but was self-inflicted. Suddenly all the great progress of the previous centuries stood in the balance as the whole of society was reoriented towards the goal of destruction.

From this point, the progress of humanity in many areas has at best slowed down and often stopped altogether. Even those areas where progress has continued - science and production - do not benefit humanity or even the system itself. Instead, they threaten both more and more, fuelling ever more catastrophic economic crises or providing ever more devastating weapons with which to wage war. The increased life expectancy seems meaningless as more and more human populations are subjected to horrific wars or the scourge of easily preventable diseases, or the grinding poverty that is the product of economic crisis. Those who are spared this nonetheless suffer an ever-increasing alienation. In the midst of material abundance, surrounded by millions of our fellow humans and provided with ever more inventive ways to communicate, more and more seem denied the simple satisfaction of normal human relationships suffer with all the attendant psychic distress that this denial implies. The sole purpose of human society is to provide for its members mutual needs - but capitalism today, for all the tremendous advancement it has provided, seems more and more incapable of doing this for all but the smallest percentage of the population and, in reality, not even them.

Capitalism has evolved into a living contradiction, an anti-social society; it is thus capitalism that is the very antithesis of ‘human nature’. Every day this utterly degenerated social organism continues to threaten humanity at multiple levels: economic crises cast more and more millions into poverty if not starvation, while increasingly intractable wars wrack the globe. The nightmares of nuclear annihilation, ecological disaster and social collapse loom threateningly on the horizon. Indeed, total social collapse is no longer some dystopian vision of a few science fiction writers - it is already the living reality facing many in the third world and an incipient reality in the advanced countries. Even if capitalism manages to avoid total self-destruction its continued existence will strip the survivors of anything resembling humanity to the point that we can talk of the spiritual extinction of humanity even if the material shell somehow carries on for a limited period. The price of the continued existence of capitalism is the total negation of humanity and all it means to be human.

If humanity is to survive, it can only do so by the utter destruction of this anti-social system. And this destruction must be accompanied by the reconstruction of society on a truly human basis. The progressive aspects of capitalism have provided humanity with the technical and social means to effect this.

The Proletariat: The Living Negation of Capitalism

One of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism is that, in spite of producing the most corrosively individualist society ever known, it has also created a productive force that represents the polar opposite. In capitalism, production has been increasingly centralised and regimented. Products incorporate materials (and the congealed labour within them) from all over the world and the division of labour has created a level of interaction between the different components of the productive apparatus never before seen.

The bourgeoisie, with its relations of commodity production, perceive production as a question of competition. Planning can only ever exist in such a vision as an alien force, imposed unnaturally over a market that is the true dominant force in capitalism. In counterpoint to this, the fundamental condition of the proletariat is associated labour. Only rarely can an individual proletarian perform all the functions necessary to create the product of his workplace. Her labour exists as one component amongst many, all of which must co-operate if a use value is to be generated. This process of co-operation is explicit in the individual factory or office but also implicit in the whole of the capitalist economy, where each link in the productive process is dependent on the those preceding it for its components and those following it to give it meaning. While the market for commodity production is naturally chaotic, the conditions of production itself are planned and ordered to the highest degree. It is in this socialised aspect of production that we see a potential for a different kind of social organisation and a class that is capable of generalising these conditions throughout society as whole.

The contradiction between the chaos of the market and the order of production is expressed in the life experience of the proletariat itself, which perceives itself to be the victim of the vagaries of the market and relations of commodity production that are expressed in society by the actions of the bourgeoisie. The working class is thus compelled to revolt against the bourgeois class and the relations of production that are expressed by this ruling class.

In the proletariat, therefore, we see a class that represents both an alternative mode of production to the present dominant one and also that this class is compelled to resist and revolt against this dominant mode of production. The struggle of the proletariat then, although conditioned by dying capitalism cannot be limited to it in the sense of a futile revolt against exploitation. It has another form of society to propose, one based on the collective, associated labour of humanity.

This new social form offers humanity a way out of the impasse of capitalism. Moreover, it offers the possibility of the abolition of class society itself and a world without class and without exploitation. The worldwide integration of production and the proletariat achieved by capitalism has laid the basis for a truly global human community. The new society will no longer be plagued by the primitive tribalism that was the hallmark of prehistoric communism and will not be plagued by wars and national conflicts. Nor will the new society be dominated by the chaos of market relations. Just as the modern factory works to a plan, so the whole of society will be managed on a planned and rational basis by the common consensus of the producers.

Conclusion

Communism is not therefore simply the utopian vision of naïve dreamers. It has already existed in concrete reality in the distant past. Nor is it somehow antithetical to human nature - in fact, it is the form of society that best corresponds to human nature! Certainly it is no more foreign to human nature than the debased monstrosity of capitalism today.

But most importantly, the concrete bases of communism exist already in the world today in the form of the modern productive process. And there exists a class whose situation in society both compels it to struggle against the old regime and to generalise those basic building blocks of communism throughout society.

Communism is not therefore just a ‘nice idea’. It is a material possibility conditioned by historical circumstances. It can also be described as a material necessity because it is the only social form that can progress human civilisation as opposed to a capitalism that is more and more destroying it.

DG 18/7/07

The presentation, delivered by a sympathiser of the ICC, laid out three basic premises for the discussion of this question:

• That communism, contrary to the ideology of the bourgeoisie, does not contradict human nature;
• That it is the decadence of capitalism that has created an objective need for communism;
• And that it is the working class that is the only social force capable of carrying overthrowing capitalism and creating communism.

The first respondent agreed with the notion that capitalism today represents a “crisis of humanity” but questioned how this crisis could be overcome. Is there not also a “crisis of leadership”, in that there is no strong revolutionary party leading the working class today? The speaker mentioned his own Troyskyist background and stated that for this milieu, this question of leadership is the principle question facing the working class.

The question stimulated some lively responses, exploring the role of the party and class in making the revolution. One comrade immediately responded that this view reduces the problem to simply a question of “getting the right leaders”. Other comrades went on to elaborate some important points. The leftist approach is flawed on a number of levels.

Most crucially, it is based on a misunderstanding of the role of the party in the revolution[1]. The party is not there to “organise” the class, its role is push forward the consciousness of the class to enable it to organise itself. This is a complex process related to the balance of class forces. To put things another way, if it’s true the working class is not lining up behind the party – or producing capable leaders – then there is a reason for this is to be found in the consciousness of the proletariat as a whole. The Trotskyist view is simplistic and idealist in the sense that it sees everything else being “ready” for revolution – you just need the right Lenin or Trotsky to come alone and the revolution will happen.

Secondly, the leftists measure consciousness on the basis of how much workers agree with them (i.e. their particular organisation). Consciousness is seen as the adherence to the party line. For communists, class consciousness is to be found in the increasing confidence of the working class to examine questions for itself rather than being dependent on a minority of “intellectuals”.

Leadership can therefore be examined only in the context of the class as a whole. The Bolsheviks were only able to take on the role they did because the mass of the class had awoken to a real consciousness of their own needs and saw that the Bolsheviks were expressing their own demands in a coherent form.

The role of minorities in this process is vital. Because of the nature of the proletariat’s oppression, at most points in history it will only be a minority of the class that is able to throw off the shackles of bourgeois ideology. They have a duty to develop this consciousness by discussing with other revolutionaries and organising themselves to spread this consciousness as far as their means allow.

The forms these efforts take will depend on the objective and subjective circumstances of the time. In the current period, the appearance of web forums and discussion groups around the planet represents this hunger for consciousness deep within the proletariat. The party is the highest product of this process but it is not the only form consciousness takes. By definition, the party cannot exist unless there is a movement within the working class to create it.

Another aspect of leadership was raised, namely the role the proletariat takes in the revolution in relation to other social classes. The ICC believes the proletariat to be a minority on a global scale. There was some debate about this, with various exchanges on differing views of the numerical weight of the peasantry in the third world. Also discussed was the effect of “decomposition” in lumpenising the working class in the central countries. But despite some disputes on the sociological aspect of this, there was a general agreement that the “core” of the working class i.e. those sectors in the heart of capitalism with relatively stable jobs, the discipline and belonging of the workplace, etc. would be a minority.

Despite the disagreements, all participants were agreed that those on the fringes of the working class were not to be written off either. These sectors can engage in powerful struggles and, because of their extreme deprivation, can often act as the detonator for movements. Nonetheless, for the struggle to advance, it is necessary for the “core” to join, bringing their experience and capacity to lead the struggle with them.

Another aspect of the discussion dealt with the issues of working class youth and their struggle to reappropriate the lessons of their class. For many workers, especially those under 30, the last big struggles that would have impacted upon their consciousness took place when they were children. Many have never experienced open struggle in the workplace. There is a hunger for solidarity, especially in reaction to extreme alienation, but little actual understanding of it. Despite this weight, there is an effort within the class to recover this – many of the strikes in the current period have placed this question firmly in the centre, through practice if not explicitly in theory.

Communists have a role to play here, but it is not to somehow artificially engender solidarity. Rather, it is a question of making workers in struggle conscious of the implications of their own praxis i.e. making, practical, instinctive actions into explicit conscious ones. This also works the other way – by drawing on the lessons of the past, revolutionaries can help the working class recover the “abstractions” of theory and lessons learnt from the past so that they can be applied again in today’s situation.

The discussion emphasised the continual nature of this drive for consciousness. It cannot be posed in the sense of the working class becomes conscious, makes the revolution and that’s it. Even after the revolution, there will be heterogeneity of consciousness within the working class. Different layers of the class will be more or less convinced about the communist programme. Only a permanent reflection and discussion undertaken by the whole of the class can drive this process forward.

In some respects, it might appear that the discussion did not focus on the immediate points of the presentation. But, in fact, it examined one of the most vital elements of the opening text – the revolutionary nature of the working class. The concern of revolutionaries to tackle this question springs from the fact that the communist revolution will be the first truly conscious revolution in human history, just as communism itself will the first human society to manage itself in a fully conscious manner. It is precisely because of this that consciousness is such a preoccupation for the proletariat – and it is the proletariat’s capacity to develop this consciousness that conditions the nature of the proletarian revolution.

The rebirth of the class struggle in 1968 was largely dominated by a sense of consciousness rising out of struggles. It was the inspiration of the massive struggles of this period that pushed new revolutionary forces to seek out the “red thread” which had been largely crushed by the counter-revolution and maintained only in the obscure writings of the communist left. Today, a different pattern in emerging: although there have been no massive struggles on the scale of ’68, significant minorities within the working class have already demonstrated an increasing drive to rediscover the “red thread”. If this trend continues, the proletariat will enter into the mass struggles of the future with a far more developed theoretical consciousness than it had in ’68. Although today we are witnessing but small steps in this direction, it is with confidence that we can say along with Marx: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

WR, 15/9/07.

[1] It should be said that confusions on the role of the party are not limited to the leftist milieu. They are also firmly entrenched in the revolutionary milieu as well, especially among the Bordigists.

None of us in this room believes that state socialism is possible. We could all agree that it’s a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. And go home.

Today, we all recognise the state as the antithesis of socialism, the enemy of a new society, an expression and conservator par excellence of the old, along with the ruling class whose privileges and mode of production it defends. The state’s fate is to be smashed by the working class en route to communism. As the ICC’s book puts it very succinctly, "As far as Marxism is concerned, the strength of the state is the measure of man’s unfreedom."

Yet we are obliged to go a little deeper for two main reasons:

a) Because the idea that the state can be the motor of social transformation is still perpetrated by those who claim to defend working class interests - let’s take the example, one among many, of Chavism in Venezuela. And illusions in this ‘road’ are not absent within the proletariat in general: there still remain confusions, for example, that nationalised capital is somehow more ‘progressive’ than ‘private’ capital, that a state health service is preferable to a private health service. Or that, in the final analysis, the state is the only protector against such ravages as terrorism, climate change, and so on. In short, we still have to wage a war ‘for hearts and minds’ as Mr Blair used to say, on this subject.

b) And because, on a more fundamental level, and despite the fact that Marx and Marxism owes its origins to a class-based critical reaction to Hegel’s idealisation of the state, backtracking on this fundamental truth has been a constant feature of life within the proletariat’s own political and mass organisations, from the IWW to the CI, from the Paris Commune to the Russian Revolution and its results, or rather its defeat.

Why is this? Why this constant combat on the question of the state? Why this going over what seems today to be such an elemental position, of what in essence was understood from the very beginnings of the politicised workers movement?

Firstly, and most obviously, because we live, exist, in bourgeois society. The dominant ideas are those of the ruling class, which has every interest in preserving the mythology of the eternal state. We, the proletariat in general, and its political expressions in particular, have to wage a constant fight against the penetration of the dominant ideology. This is a cliché. But a cliché is merely the truth repeated until it’s lost its original - living - content. It’s still the truth.

In the real movement which has unfolded in front of our eyes - in the history of our movement - this has not expressed itself abstractly but concretely at certain, particular stages, around issues specific to the conditions in which they arose. Thus the ICC’s book exposes isolated examples of Marx’s own illusions - under the weight of the dominant ideology and the level of development of capital at the time - that in certain countries like Britain or America - the proletariat can actually assume a dominant position through bourgeois democracy, through perhaps elections, without first destroying the state but, instead, through its mechanisms.

However such aberrations - and that’s what they were - are far removed from the general line of march of Marxism which defined, refined and honed itself precisely against the incursions of the dominant ideology, and specifically its manifestations within the workers’ movement expressed by reformism and anarchism.

Not just against the ideological incursions of capital, of course, which is just one side of what is a social relationship, but in light of the actual movement of the proletariat. Thus the Paris Commune - "the real movement which is worth more than a hundred programmes" - enabled Marxism to become more precise: the proletariat couldn’t just take hold of the bourgeois state and use it for its own ends: in fact it was obliged to confront, to smash that state in order to assure its domination over society and effect a social transformation.

Here, in the Commune, despite its limitations in duration, extent and in the material conditions under which it arose, was posed and answered an eminently practical, political question: what is the process through which the proletariat must pass in order to transform its own conditions and those of humanity? The answer was that there is no avoiding a centralised, armed conflict with and against the ruling class’s state.

Many more lessons, in embryo, too: concerning the revolutionary ’semi’- state that replaces the bourgeois state: not an end in itself, or even a direct expression of the proletariat, but one over which the proletariat will still have to retain its autonomous, political control, concerning which it would have to lop off its most pernicious expressions. Hence the mass elected and revocable delegates, mandated to carry out specific tasks, as opposed to the former bureaucratic elite answerable only to the national capital’s needs. This question would be further clarified in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

Plus the fact that this experience of the Commune was the result of a war that saw, for the first time, the bourgeoisie of different countries unite against the proletariat: an end, as far as Marx was concerned, to discussions over national ‘defensive’ wars, at least in the most developed heartlands of capital, even if the colonial question couldn’t at this stage be resolved.

All these issues are touched on by the Marxist currents of the time. Some lessons become more ingrained than others.

However… History is not static. Clarity in the final analysis doesn’t depend on abstract will and purism. It’s not homogeneous throughout the class, and that goes for its revolutionary minorities.

The Paris Commune ended in a defeat, a bloody massacre, the break-up of the Ist International and a retreat of the workers’ movement in general. In addition, bourgeois relations of production were still in the ascendancy: the most dynamic growth of this mode of production was still unfolding.

Thus in the wake of this defeat of the first proletarian attempt to take power, the social wealth generated by a still ascendant mode of production allowed for the further penetration of bourgeois ideas into the workers movement. The lessons of the need to smash the bourgeois state, not to use it to create socialism, were going to have to be restated.

For when the workers struggle re-emerged amidst the apparent flowering of bourgeois political economy, its growth was accompanied by a certain receding of the perspective of revolution itself, the maximum programme, in favour of pursuing the minimum programme, the necessary and possible struggle to ameliorate immediate living conditions, to win the right of a shorter working day, of the right of assembly, and so on. Such concerns weren’t a deflection of a revolution that in any case was not on the immediate agenda, but a necessary part of the proletariat’s education, its formation as a class, one which was genuinely able to influence affairs in its favour.

Nonetheless such successes came at a price. On the level of the revolutionary perspective, the famous Gotha programme which was meant to found the German SDP sees all kinds of illusions, including the idea that the creation of socialism depends on state-assisted workers’ cooperatives. The critique made by Marx and Engels of this proposed programme obliges them to clarify, to deepen the communist programme, to insist that, contrary to its illusions, communism couldn’t be declared the day after the revolution, but that a period of transition would necessarily ensue; that the object of communism wasn’t the perpetuation of exchange relations, or attaching a value to individual or even collective labour power, and that the statification of capital did not equal its suppression.

In fact, long before the onset of decadence, before the lessons bequeathed by the Russian Revolution and its defeat, we can see that Marxism, from the very beginning, defined the state as the antithesis of socialism, as the expression of a society divided into classes. The capitalist state could neither be ignored nor conquered, was not and is not a tool through which the proletariat could express its revolutionary nature. State socialism is indeed a contradiction in terms, an impossibility.

Today, there are revolutionaries - and many anarchists - who take this to mean that the 19th century struggle for reforms, parliamentarism, the growth of mass unionism and mass proletarian parties was an unnecessary and dangerous detour from the maximum programme. Such views ignore the real, material conditions of the time.

It’s necessary not to read back into history: not to parachute our knowledge of the appearance of the weapon of the mass strike and the creation of workers councils or soviets; the bankruptcy of the bourgeois mode of production as evidenced by the First and Second World Wars and the unprecedented economic slump that lay between them , and above all the lessons generated by the revolutionary wave - it’s necessary to really understand that these events were not known to the revolutionaries of the 19th century.

We’re here talking of a time where, in certain places on the planet, capitalism did not even exist. We’re talking of a time when it was by no means certain that the bourgeois, let alone the proletarian revolution would triumph: when feudal political forms and autocratic dictatorship still reigned. A time when, even in those countries like France and Germany where the bourgeois economy was making great strides, the realm of political control was still in the hands of dictatorships such as those wielded by Bismarck or by Napoleon. We’re talking of a time when workers were forbidden to combine, to meet, to have their own press or parties, to have their views affect the unfolding of reality through political representation, as well as through economic struggle. A time, in short, when the proletariat was still forging itself and being forged as a distinct class, when capitalism was still laying the basis for communism.

Looking at it this way, what is remarkable is not the insistence of Marxists of the day on the necessity to influence current events by being involved in them, but on their clear-sightedness in insisting that this phase would not, could not last forever, that at a certain stage in the evolution of capital, the proletarian revolution would be top of the agenda.

In his later years, through his study of the Russian question, Marx began to see that not all areas of the globe would necessarily have to go through a bourgeois stage of development, that conditions in the main capitalist centres implied that the time of moving directly to the proletarian revolution and a direct confrontation with the capitalist state was approaching on a global level.

Based on these prophetic insights, based on the actual evolution of the struggle between classes towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, revolutionaries such as Engels, Pannekoek, Luxembourg and Lenin attempted to criticise re-orient the workers movements of which they were part, began to re-assert that the time for winning advancements within capitalist society had to be subsumed into preparations for the coming struggle for proletarian power, a struggle which implied preparations for a direct confrontation with the bourgeois state.

All power to the soviets, not all power to the state: this was the Bolshevik’s revolutionary translation of this situation in 1917. The defeat of the revolution proved the point in negative. From that point on, there was no question of state socialism - the discussion was about state capitalism.

KT 28.7.2007

Afternoon session: Discussion of ‘Why state socialism is impossible’

Within a general agreement that the capitalist state cannot bring about revolutionary change - "revolution is the destruction of the state" - two main areas of discussion emerged:

a) The persistence of strong illusions within the working class about the state as ‘protector’ of the proletariat, illusions which found an echo in the meeting itself;

b) What method to use to analyse the aims and means of the workers’ struggle in the 19th century and today?

On illusions in the existing state apparatus, one comrade (Devrim, EKS) said there were certainly those who thought that state socialism existed - eg the defenders of Chavez in Venezuela - and the role of the ICC’s section there was essential to counter such propaganda by clearly showing the deterioration of the proletariat’s actual conditions of life. But more pernicious than the idea that the state can produce socialism is the belief that it can protect the working class, an illusion which is widespread. In Turkey, for example, many workers would currently support the idea of a coup by one faction of the state against another more ‘backward’ (Islam-leaning) faction. In areas where there is no strong democratic tradition, the idea of a fight for ‘democratic rights’ can be strong.

Other comrades agreed on the persistence of such illusions which had weighed heavily on important struggles such as Poland 1980 (illusions in the democratic state and ‘free’ trade unionism as protector against and vanquisher of the Stalinist state) or the struggles of workers in South Africa in 1980/90 which (temporarily) had been derailed behind support of the emerging ‘anti-apartheid’ faction of the state (Mandela/ANC). These examples expressed the weight of the general idea that it was possible to reform the state apparatus for the workers’ benefit.

In Britain, the mistaken notion of the state as defender of workers’ interests was exemplified in the proletariat’s attachment to protecting ‘our free’ National Health Service (NHS) from cuts in jobs and services, particularly through ‘privatization’. One comrade (DL) who had broken from the Trotskyist milieu said that even if he could be persuaded that defending the NHS was not in workers’ interests, many workers would not be easily convinced.

In response, various comrades made the following points:

• Many illusions within the proletariat on the possibility of steering the state in a more ‘beneficial’ direction stemmed from the period in the 19thcentury when the struggle for lasting and meaningful reforms was both possible and necessary. Today, under radically different conditions, and despite the fact that communists like Engels had already begun to denounce the idea of the state taking over the capitalist economy as a progressive measure, the weight of such traditions still hangs heavy
• The first time the bourgeoisie in GB became really concerned about the health of the working class was during the late 19th century Boer War when workers were not fit enough to fight for their country. In other words, state control of health was linked to the nascent war economy, to the evolution of state capitalism. The provision by the bourgeoisie (as opposed to the proletariat’s own self-organisation in the 19th century) of basic health and education services was not for the benefit of ‘the poor’ but to defend the needs of the ruling class, and such needs of accumulation change in different periods. In the late 1940s, after WW2, and faced with the necessity of both social control and reconstruction with a programme of full employment, the national organisation of health and education services, as well as production (widespread nationalisations) was an essential plank of state capitalism.
• Such services are not ‘free’: they are part of the social wage - ie they are the product of the collective exploitation of the proletariat and represent that portion of its means of reproducing itself not given directly in wages. One comrade estimated that this ‘free’ health service had cost him £70,000 in ‘contributions’ taken from his wage packet over his working life, not including dental and eye costs
• The situation is not static: today it is state capitalism itself that is in crisis, making cuts in jobs and services; mass (if sometimes ‘hidden’) unemployment reappears, workers are obliged to pay more for less in health and education while the latter is used as a social tool to ‘mop up’ unemployment and turns out ill-trained graduates who struggle to find work, while pensions are also attacked. In Poland and South Africa, the workers are obliged to confront the very ‘reformed’ states in which they had illusions. In Britain, where the health sector is the largest employer in the land, cuts are met by almost continual mobilisations of protest, even if these are fragmented region by region, and by trade union sabotage.
• Thus despite the existing and inevitable illusions, this is a fertile terrain for the intervention of communists if they are able to do so ‘intelligently’. Workers remember the time when they could afford neither to visit a doctor nor receive state education and rightly want to defend their existing provisions. The communists too are against job cuts for nurses, doctors, teachers, but who is making these attacks? Why, it is the employer itself, the NHS, or the state education sector! Workers can’t fight effectively if they think the state-boss is on their side. We must help ‘tear the veil’ which masks this reality: they can’t ‘defend the NHS’ but must attack the state of which it is part and which is leading the attacks. Such struggles in the ‘advanced democracies’ give an important lead to other areas of the globe.

Comrades perhaps summed up this part of the discussion by saying the ICC’s book Communism Is Not a Nice Idea but a Material Necessity addresses the underlying illusion: communism is utopian; we can only make capitalism more humane. This applies to the idea of defending the nationalised health service as being more humane than a privatised one.

The discussion also and inevitably touched on the question of capitalism’s different periods - that of its ascendancy and that of its senility or decadence and the different conditions that these epochs impose on the form, content and even the goals of the working class and this was the second major theme examined.

For the so-called ‘anti-state’ anarchists who nonetheless are often the fiercest defenders of the NHS and of nationalised rather than privatised companies, such distinctions are meaningless. Even the minority of their number who today denounce unions or parliamentary activity often do so by claiming that work for or within these institutions was always reactionary, thus ignoring the real evolution of capital and the struggles it produced at this or that moment in the past - by dismissing vast swathes of the proletariat’s history and political organisation, in effect.

One disagreement which might be said to show the influence of this ‘radical’-sounding rhetoric came in a discussion on the position of Marx, Engels and the IWA concerning the American Civil War in which they - together with large swathes of the proletariat in England - supported the Union of the northern states against the slave-owners of the south. For comrade Devrim this, together with Marx’s position on the1871 Franco-Prussian war, was tantamount to communists acting as recruiting sergeants for the bourgeoisie, urging workers to die for their bosses. The correct position was that of the Bolsheviks in 1914: turn the war into a class war - indeed the workers did rise up in 1871 (ie the Paris Commune).

For the ICC and other comrades, it was a question of method, of the actual situation unfolding in front of the communists’ eyes, not one of universal panaceas.

In the US civil war it was a question of promoting a revolutionary mode of production - capitalism, which in turn was laying down the material basis for socialism - against the incursions of a retrogressive organisation of society in the form of the slave-holding south.

This historical, dialectical, materialist method was first popularised in The Communist Manifesto which argued that the bourgeoisie was still a revolutionary class which had yet to develop globally. In this sense, genuine bourgeois revolutions and progressive national struggles should be supported by the proletariat and its organisations. The Communist League’s debate on the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 drew out the fact that such support should be strictly limited: the working class should attempt to act independently and autonomously within this process: it wasn’t a case of uncritically supporting even the most radical bourgeois and petty bourgeois currents. Nonetheless, it remained a question of in which direction did the proletariat’s long-term interests lie.

By 1870, there was still only one fully-developed capitalist country on the planet - it was in no way analogous to 1914 and the outbreak of WW1 which showed that on a global level, capital had completed its ‘laying of the foundations’ for socialism and had therefore lost any progressive content. However even here, Marx and the 1st International recognised a change in the situation: in their first address to workers at the outbreak of the Franco Prussia war, it was a question of resisting through the friendship of German and French workers, the encroachments of Bonapartism which were seen as a threat to the development of a unified capitalism in Germany. However, once Germany became an aggressor in the war, it was a signal that ‘progressive’ wars in Europe were at an end (even if this ‘lesson’ was not well assimilated). Underlying this was a method which tried to look at the proletariat’s historic, not just immediate interests.

In conclusion, the question is not ‘did Marx and Engels make mistakes’ but was their fundamental method of understanding ‘the historic line of march’ correct or not? It is only such a method which allows us today, regarding for example China, to understand that recent developments there are not some repetition of early capitalist accumulation, nor even a modern return to such methods involving gross exploitation and the despoliation of the environment, but a very real expression of the fact that state capitalism offers absolutely no perspective for the working class today other than misery and war. This was not the case in the 19th century.

WR, 15/9/07.