SPGB Lectures and Meetings (1977)

Party News from the November 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

R. Weidberg wrote under the name of 'Ronnie Warrington' in the Socialist Standard.

SPGB Meetings (1987)

Party News from the November 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Blogger's Notes:

Too many meetings and, sadly, not enough space in the label section to include every speaker and every branch. 

I can't believe there isn't a recording of the debate with Lady Olga Maitland but it isn't in the audio section of the SPGB website, so who knows? However, there is an audio recording of an earlier debate with Lady Olga  - on a different subject - that dates from 1984 which is on the Party website:

DEBATE – IS BRITAIN WORTH DYING FOR? 

NO – Steve Coleman (SPGB)

YES – Lady Olga Maitland, (Women and Families for Defence)

Venue: Central Library, Islington

Date: 19th January 1984

There was also a written report of that meeting in the February 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard.

With regards to Bristol Branch's meeting, where Keith Graham spoke on the subject of the Battle of Democracy: Marx vs Lenin, Graham wrote a book with that same title, which was reviewed in the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard.

SPGB Meetings (1990)

Party News from the November 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Christopher Hampton's 'The Ideology of the Text' was reviewed in the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Struggle in South Africa (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a little over a month at least 250 African men, women and children have been butchered by South Africa's armed police. In the first day alone, 25 — mainly children — were slaughtered in Soweto. At the end of a week it was 176 killed, 1,139 injured and 1,298 arrested.

The rioting and demonstrations have continued in many other African townships and even the Coloured and White universities. The immediate cause of the big Soweto demonstration of school-children and parents was the Government’s insistence on Afrikaans being used as the language of instruction. In the reserves, however, schools are free to choose English instead. There is little doubt that Africans regard Afrikaans as “the symbol of our oppression.’’ It is the language of the police, of the pass laws, of the job reservation rules, of all that they detest. It is the boss’s language, not theirs.

The Nationalists would prefer to have no blacks at all. But they recognize that industry, mining etc. would collapse without black labour. So they built townships outside the big cities, outsize council estates with minimal amenities. In Soweto “fewer than 20% of their tiny, boxlike houses have electricity, no more than 5% have hot running water.” (Time, 28th June 1976.)

Government policy decrees that all Africans belong to the tribal reserves and should settle there. In a 1947 pamphlet on Apartheid, the Nationalists declared: “the Bantu in the urban areas should be regarded as migratory citizens not entitled to political or social rights equal to those of the Whites” (quoted in Apartheid, ed. Alex La Guma, 1972) In 1969 a Nationalist MP justified the townships on the grounds that the urban Africans ”are only supplying a commodity, the commodity of labour . . . it is labour we are importing and not labourers as individuals . . . numbers make no difference”.

In Guilty Land, P. van Rensburg sums up the policy: “at the moment the Blacks are still necessary for the urban labour force . . . but they must not be allowed to gain the impression that they a permanent part of the town and city population. When they are moved to residentially segregated areas, they can have no freehold rights ... for otherwise the Government fears they would regard themselves as something more than temporary sojourners.”

The urban Africans have no security of tenure. If they lose their jobs or get in any kind of trouble they can be "endorsed out” or jailed. A Pretoria survey showed that only 15 per cent of the township’s residents were “born and bred” there. The African worker is merely a migrant. The government denies him either the vote or the right to strike or belong to a registered trade union. He is thus nearly helpless in the hands of the capitalists. One such migrant was John Mvalo: “John was conceived during one of his father’s visits home from the mines . . .  Of his working life from the age of 16 to 47 (31 years) 36% of his time was spent at home and 64% in employment away. He had had 34 different jobs and the average length of a job had been 47 weeks.” (Geographical Review, Jan. 1968.)

Workers' Wages

The pay of Johannesburg Africans is only one-fifth of that earned by Whites in the same area, according to Time. A survey in 1957, after the bus boycott, indicated that for the bare essentials a family of five needed £27.10s. per month but the average income of such a family was only £18 per month. Ten years later a Johannesburg survey revealed that more than two-thirds of African families had incomes below R53 per month — the absolute minimum.

The next year the minimum figure rose to R59.70: “the effective minimum level of income is generally estimated at one and a half times the poverty datum line figure, which would mean that a family at Soweto should have at least R95.63 a month.” (Hilda Bernstein, in Apartheid.)

In 1969 a survey gave these figures for all urban African households:

Monthly incomes between   R1 and R19   25%

   ” ” ” R20 and R49   40%

   ” ” ” R50 and R79   20%

                                over      R80                   15%

In other words, 85 per cent of urban African families were living below “the effective minimum level of income” and about half were trying to survive on incomes below even the poverty datum line! A survey of African schoolchildren, by the South African Institute of Race Relations, found that 60-70 per cent. were “recognizably malnourished”, 50 per cent. “needed nursing and medical attention” and almost 10 per cent. “required hospitalization for diseases directly or indirectly attributable to malnutrition”.

But if the urban African is badly off, note how much worse off he could be. If he worked on a farm he could earn an average of £50 per annum or, possibly, nothing at all: “the African works for a fixed number of days in a year, between 90 and 180 days, in return for the right to live on the farm, to graze cattle, and to cultivate the land.” (M.B. Yengwa, in Apartheid.) In 1972 there were about 2 million African workers on White farms.

Out of Town

The urban African worker’s insecurity is increased by the fear of being sent back to the Bantustans or tribal reserves. These comprise a mere 13 per cent. of South Africa’s land and only the Transkei has any coastline or is sizeable. Its only port, however, is zoned for Whites. “The land is impoverished and overcrowded with people and livestock; practically no economic development has taken place, and the primitive subsistence agriculture cannot at present support even the small proportion of resident Bantu; there are almost no mineral resources and no industry; and the population has acquired neither skills nor capital.” (Geographical Review, Jan. 1968.)

The Government refuses to allow White capital investment inside these areas. Instead the Government have insisted on the development of Border Industries just outside. The Border Industries, in spite of the cheap labour force, are unable to compete effectively against the heavy concentration of industry and capital in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging area, which in 1969 housed 17 per cent. of the population and produced about 55 per cent. of S.A.’s industrial products. “The Reserves remain an economy without manpower. The men live in two worlds . . . More than 2 million people spend their lives circulating between industrial centres in White areas and in the subsistence life of the Reserves.” (Geographical Review.)

The same writer is anxious to point out how harmful this is: “only about half of the annual potential manpower resource of the Reserves is economically applied in White areas”. Moreover, according to a 1960 writer in the South African Journal of Economics, “a total annual potential of 1.140 000 man-years is available in the Bantu areas, of which 600,000 are not economically applied”. Now that’s what really hurts the bourgeois boffins: all that “cheap, docile” labour-power and it’s not being exploited. Just think of the loss of surplus-value involved!

In 1954 the Tomlinson Commission recommended that industry in the reserves should be financed by White capital investment. But the Government cut its own investment fund by two-thirds, refused to allow White capital investment and insisted on agriculture being based mainly on the tribal system.

Tomlinson proposed that 50 per cent. of the population of the reserves should be removed to enable the rest merely to get a living of 168 dollars per annum. Others suggested “a minimum subsistence figure three, for our even five times the Commission’s figure” (Geographical Review).

M. B. Yengwa describes life in the reserves in Apartheid: “Here grinding poverty and the resulting malnutrition, disease and squalor have become a way of life. This is the land of women, children and old and sick people. The healthy and active are the only exports “the Reserves have in the form of cheap ‘Bantu’ labour which they sell to the mining, agricultural and secondary industries in the White areas. In the Reserves — all Reserves — famine and starvation are the usual seasonal visitations.”

African Education

The government’s view of African education is clear. "The school must equip him (the Bantu pupil) to meet the demands which the economic life of South Africa will impose on him . . . There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.” (Dr. Verwoerd, 1953.) Also: "Who will do the manual work if you give the Natives an academic education? . . . We should so conduct our schools that the Native who attends these schools knows that to a great extent he must be the labourer in the country” (Mr. le Roux, Nationalist MP).

To ensure that Africans don’t get too much education, the Government instituted a system of “academic ceilings.” The result is a phenomenal dropout rate. In 1968, of the 78 per cent. of African children in school, only 4 per cent. were getting secondary education. Other factors which prevent Africans from getting adequate schooling are lack of money, inadequate classrooms, gross overcrowding and double sessions in most schools (even triple sessions in some). Africans are forced to pay one-fifth or more of teachers’ salaries themselves, to raise half the cost of school building (from higher primary up) and to pay for school maintenance.

In 1969, the Johannesburg Star reported that the cost of education in Soweto schools had risen 50 per cent. The teacher-pupil ratio went from 1:42 in 1949 to 1:72 in 1969: “ill-fed families throughout South Africa cut down on the skim milk powder and mealie meal and contribute cents saved to pay thousands of extra teachers privately, thus improving the teacher-pupil ratio to the still appalling 1:58.5” (The Failure of Bantu Education, 1970).

In farming areas the policy is to have only primaries and these can only be established if the farmer wishes. The schools can be useful to the farmer. In 1969 the Minister of Bantu Education told the Senate: “we have made it compulsory that where the farmer wants these facilities, part of the school instruction . . . must be training in the normal activities on the farm . . . any farmer who has a farm school on his farm and who wishes to make use of the school children under the supervision of the teacher to assist with certain farm activities, this can be arranged . . .” The success of the Government’s policy has resulted in there being “no registered non-White veterinarians, architects, civil, electrical or mechanical engineers” (UNESCO). Dr. Birley visited the 4 secondary schools of the African township of Johannesburg: "I have recently surveyed their laboratories and equipment carefully. The schools have . . . between them 13 Bunsen burners, six balances and three microscopes.” Literacy among Africans dropped from 80 per cent. in ’59 to only 40-50 per cent. in ’63 (Government figures). In addition, the Government bans “unregistered” teaching, including night schools, and reduced its grant for night schools from R46.000 (’58-9) to zero (’65). The wonder is that any Africans learn to read at all!

Effects on the Economy

Some of these facts go to explain just why the world capitalist class condemns Apartheid. Here are some typical criticisms:

“The very idea of separateness is a renunciation of market forces . . . it denies the non-Whites the right to advance industrially in existing fields where their skills can be fully used productively to the benefit of the community as a whole; it inhibits the development of consumer purchasing power and therefore it discourages new investment” (Fridjohn, quoted in The Geographical Review.)

In this context “productively” means of course “profitably”, the “benefit of the community as a whole” really means “the benefit of the employing class and the greater exploitation of the wage-slave class”.

The low wages which are preserved by job reservation, the pass system, denial of the right to strike or to organize in trade unions, lack of any political power, and concentration in the starvation areas of the reserves, these low wages which are so helpful to the farming and mining sections of the capitalist class in S.A. spell “wastage” to the manufacturers. (In S.A., industry has only got ofF the ground recently: in 1972 it still accounted for only 28 per cent. of the Gross National Product.) By the year 2000, it is estimated there will be more than 20 million Africans in S.A. Are they never to be allowed colour TV, washing machines, hi-fi, DIY gadgets, cars, holidays abroad and so on? After all, it’s a poor sort of a home market which specialises in mealie meal and skim-milk. Not much profit in them.

The “liberal” Patrick van Rensburg deplores apartheid because it means extra costs for “the taxpayer” (those poor capitalists!): all those dual bus services, separate park benches, loos, exits and entrances, the enormous bureaucracy needed to administer the Population Register, and the pass laws, not to mention boss’s army of police, spies and paid informers. Also he points out that “if the burden and worry of undernourishment were removed at once, Africans would immediately produce more”. Which shows us whose interests he really has at heart! Greater productivity means greater profit-making for bosses, greater exploitation for workers. Another point he makes is that job reservation, preventing the Africans from competing for skilled jobs, cushions inefficient Whites.

Quo Vadis

As Socialists we do not concern ourselves with the plight of the capitalists, and their dispute with South Africa’s White farmers. The pass laws exist to protect the farmers from the effect of higher wages in the urban areas. In South Africa political power is held by the representatives of the farming and business community, and working-class Whites support them. The Government’s policy has been successful in dividing the workers of S.A. on grounds not only of race but also of language — English or Afrikaans speaking.

It is a fallacy to suppose that the ending of Apartheid would mean the ending of slums, hunger, unemployment, and insecurity. Nowhere can you find a country which has eliminated these miserable features of the profit-producing system. The Africans of South Africa will remain second-class citizens as long as they are part of the international wage-slave class. Their poverty is a result of their class position in society, only made worse by the fact that they as a group have been selected for the low-paid jobs in the economy and that they are denied the right to organize for better living and working conditions, either politically or through trade-union action.

The Socialist attitude has nothing in common with the Pan Africanist Congress which operates on racially divisive lines, or the African National Congress, one of whose goals is “equal pay for equal work”. Both are reformist organizations. Neither is based on class-consciousness, and an awareness that the African worker is a part of the international working class, just as the South African boss class is a part of the international brotherhood of bosses. The workers of S.A. have a long way to go in discovering that their real enemy is our class-divided social system, and that unity on the basis of the common interests of all workers everywhere, “without distinction of race or sex”, is the real key to their liberation from misery and exploitation.

Charmian Skelton

SPGB Meetings: 1985-86 Winter Lectures (1985)

Party News from the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1988)

Party News from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Click on the image to enlarge.

That Party and its Promises! (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

By “that party” we mean of course the Labour Party, sometimes called the Socialist Party, but which does not stand for Socialism.

In the opinion of Ron Hayward — and he should know — the Labour Party stands for “equality in education”. At least that’s what he told the writer on an LBC phone-in. Whether “equality in education” is feasible or not, desirable or not, is hardly worth investigating. The dole queues are full of graduates, and millions of well-educated women find themselves reluctantly at the kitchen sink. Let us, however, take a good look at what the Labour Party in office has done about education and compare its record with its promises.

The Labour Government has been proposing cuts in local authority spending, and as the biggest share of local authority spending goes on education, the schools are going to take the brunt. Surrey County Council is reported (Guardian, 5th July) as planning to cease all nursery education, to increase class sizes in the schools and to raise the fees for higher education courses. This is a pattern which we can expect to see followed by most other education authorities.

Let us compare this situation with the picture presented in Labour’s 1959 manifesto — The Future Labour Offers You. Under the heading “Our Children”. Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan and Co. told us:

The worst handicap a child can face at school is the oversize class. Overcrowding in the schools is a nightmare to teachers and to parents. That is why our first task must be to cut classes in primary as well as secondary schools to a maximum of thirty.” (our emphasis.)

Contrast this “first task” brainwave with the actual reality. Many children going through what the state calls “education” have done so, even in the good years and “good” areas, in classes of 35, some rising to 40 or more. Now the size of classes is likely to rise again, not from a real shortage of qualified teachers, but because there is not enough money forthcoming from the Treasury to pay the teachers.

In 1959, Labour also told us: “Most important of all, our plans will require many more teachers. We shall launch a big drive to recruit and train them as swiftly as possible.” Well, at least one of our recent governments has done that. And the result is that with the present Labour Government saying “less money for education”, a large proportion of these expensively-trained teachers are experiencing the frustration of joblessness. While the classes get bigger and bigger. Talk about waste!

Returning to 1959 we find the Labour Party declaring : “The main fault with our present State education is that there is not enough of it. In order to give every child a fair chance to choose a career and to train for it, we must be prepared to spend more.”

Exactly the opposite of what they are doing now. The fact is that the political parties’ manifestoes are like the apples the greengrocer puts in his front window. They look mouthwatering! So you go inside on the promise of all that lovely, glossy, sound-looking fruit, only to get sold wrinkled, bruised, unsound fruit that the greengrocer dredges up from under the counter or some dark corner that you can’t quite see.

The professional reformist politician is like the most unscrupulous greengrocer you could ever have the misfortune to meet! You even become so carried away in your enthusiasm that you don’t stop to ask the vital question “Can he produce the goods?”

If you did ask, you’d get no meaningful answers out of him, but only specious assurances. Here’s a sample from that 1959 Labour manifesto: “A programme for one Parliament is not a blueprint for Utopia. What we have summarised here can be done in that limited time. We can make such great social advances as bringing real security into old age through our National Superannuation scheme. We can cut down the size of school classes. We can turn shabby old houses into modern homes. So this is a practical assessment of the jobs to be done, and a realistic account of the way we propose to do it.”

Which means that they want to do these things and hope we’ll take their word for it that they can. To which we reply: if it could be done, why wasn’t it? And conversely, if it was not possible except when the economic climate was right, why claim so confidently that it could be done? This charge of making promises that cannot be carried out is one that can equally be levelled at the Tories, the Liberals, and other assorted reformists, including the Nationalists among those who have swindled the electorate.

The moral of the story is this. A political party without principles is merely a vote-catching machine, governed by expediency. Its soup-kitchen philosophy of being kind to the kiddies is easily ditched whenever it should appear to be in conflict with the short-term economic interests of capitalism.

Capitalism just does not work for our benefit: it’s the bosses’ benefit show, not ours. There is only one way we can use our votes in line with our economic and social interests as workers. And that is by voting and working for Socialism and the end of this wages, waste and want system.

Charmian Skelton

Letter: Women's Movements (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Women's Movements

It is seldom that the Socialist Standard gives cause for complaint on factual grounds, and also it seems rather churlish to quibble at anything in the lavish, and extremely interesting, 70th anniversary issue.

But in The First and Only Liberationists I read that “the idea that (women) might need a wider horizon than could be provided by a home and family had scarcely dawned”. And the writer also asks, “Who else (other than the founders of the Socialist Party) in 1904 was interested in the freedom of women?”

The answer is, women. The modern assumption that the women’s movement only started up recently is false. The evidence is that there have been women demanding “emancipation” or “equal rights”, as a sex, since the Eighteenth century. In America the First Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls in 1848 and resolved “that the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities”.

Other national conventions were held annually in America right through the nineteenth century and the Washington Convention in 1900 was dominated by the question of working class women and women’s position as wage-earners—“without political expression woman’s economic value is at the bottom of the scale . . . She must do better work than men for equal pay or equal work for less pay”. (Voices from Women’s Liberation) That such a situation still prevails today is proof of our Party’s contention that it is nothing to have a vote if you don’t use it properly.

If I can add something personal on this question, it is that as a women I am proud to be a member of this Party which has never treated me as a (mere) women, has never pigeon-holed me into some specifically “woman’s” work, but has always treated all members, white or black, male or female, as comrades in a common struggle.

C. Sultan 

Woking

Reply:

Thanks for the compliments, which are among very many received, on the Anniversary Issue.

In the context of that article it was not possible to enlarge on the point but “scarcely dawned” was not meant to imply that no one had questioned the  rôle of women in society. Rather that this questioning was not widespread. It is of course true that some women, and a few men, had been actively involved in campaigns for women’s rights over many years. For example the first leaflet on female suffrage had been issued in 1847. The vote was originally seen as a way of obtaining “social justice”. To the sometime scorn of the modern women’s movement its attainment became an end in itself.

The question “who else” was, at that time, interested in women was about political parties. Here the position taken by the SPGB at its formation, in 1904, was unique.

Editors.

Lenin's Legacy (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is irrelevant that in Russia the means of production are (mostly) not privately owned. Capital can be owned collectively: "the capitalists as a whole take direct part in the exploitation of the total working class by the totality of capital". [1] Bukharin emphasised the "class monopoly in the means of production", when "vulgar economists” had eyes only for private capitalists. [2] Engels wrote:

State ownership of the productive forces is not the answer . . . neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital . . . The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians”. [3]

Russian economic and political conditions differ from the West in that the means of production and distribution are formally owned by the state, and that there is a monopoly of political power by one party which consequently exercises monopolistic control over the means of production and distribution. Inequalities arising from the Party’s dictatorship have created a new exploiting class, powerful and privileged. "The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians."

Lenin preached and practised what Marx condemned. Lenin, a product of the Russian "intelligentsia", was caught up in the struggle against feudalism when the Russian proletariat was still only a fraction of the workforce. His policy was to control workers’ organisations by setting up secret cells. “The Party must be the vanguard, the leader of the broad mass of the working class”, he wrote. [4] Marx however declared: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves". [5]

Engels considered that in Russia "both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie exist only in sporadic form and have not passed beyond the inferior stage of development" Against Tkachev's view that Russians were "the chosen people" who could bypass capitalism altogether, he argued: "the existence of the bourgeoisie is . . . as necessary a condition for the socialist revolution as the proletariat. A person who maintains that this revolution could be carried out more easily in his country because it has neither proletariat nor bourgeoisie proves by his statement that he has understood nothing of socialism”. [6]

Marx held that Russia was not yet capitalist: “if Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation . . . she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians’’. [7] Fifty years later, Stalin presided over the ruthless process of primitive accumulation when

great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled as free and "unattached" proletarians on the labour-market . . . And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. [8]

In 1918, the Socialist Party of Great Britain declared: "there is no ground whatever for supposing that (the peasants) are ready or willing to accept social ownership of the land". Could Russia be ready for socialism? “Unless a mental revolution such as the world has never seen before has taken place, or an economic change has occurred more rapidly than history has ever recorded, the answer is ‘No'.” [9]

Since the essential preconditions for a socialist revolution did not exist, the irony of history changed Lenin and his successors into midwives of capitalism, not socialism. The “vanguard party” with its "advanced theory” had to follow the bloody path of primitive accumulation, to clear the way for the capitalism they had willed to destroy.

Lenin gained power in a backward country whose economy had collapsed. The European revolutions he confidently expected failed to occur, and no class in Russia supported socialism. “The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme Party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe", wrote Engels.[10] Since neither the economic nor the political conditions for socialism existed, any attempt to introduce socialism by abandoning the market economy and commodity production was utopian and doomed to disaster.

The Vanguard Party

Lenin claimed that "by its own forces the working class can only arrive at a trade union consciousness . . . the workers can acquire class political consciousness only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers".[11] This view did not come from Marx but from the Narodnik tradition “Neither now nor in the future is the people, left to itself, capable of achieving the social revolution. Only we. the revolutionary minority, can". wrote Tkachev. [12] In 1891 Axelrod argued that the workers' struggle was industrial, not political: “in the struggle for political freedom. the advanced sections of the proletariat follow the revolutionary circles and the fractions of the so-called intelligentsia". [12]

Lenin believed in this leadership role: “the intellectuals are good at solving questions ‘of principle'. They are good at drafting plans and supervising the execution of plans". [12] His view reflected the undeveloped state of the Russian working class. It was not held by Marx who, while recognising the importance of theory, also recognised the workers’ ability to organise themselves without the leadership of a self-appointed élite. The early utopian socialists, he wrote, saw in the proletariat only "the most suffering class . . . incapable of any historical initiative"; to them "the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat" was inconceivable. [13] These comments apply equally to Lenin.

Marx's view of the socialist revolution was that it will be achieved by the working class — "the only really revolutionary class”. They will organise themselves. Vanguardism is a denial of Marx's most basic proposition.

The Dictatorship of the Party

On leaving Switzerland, Lenin wrote: "the Russian proletariat is less organised, prepared and class-conscious than the proletariat of other countries . . . Russia is a peasant country and one of the most backward of European countries”. [14] He seized power knowing this, and knowing the Bolsheviks were a minority. To retain power he established a dictatorship.

Within weeks he created the Cheka, an “absolutely independent organisation . . . with power to carry out searches, arrests and executions". [15] Dzerzhinski. the head of the Cheka, was to become head of the VSNKh, set up to control the economy. The Constituent Assembly was dissolved, and trade unions were under the control of the Party.

Tackling starvation in the cities, Lenin declared the problem “has to be solved by military methods, with absolute ruthlessness". [16] Terror was not ruled out. “The dictatorship is a rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws", he wrote. [17] Forget democracy: "no essential contradiction can exist between the Soviet, that is, the socialist democracy, and the exercise of dictatorial power by a single person”. [18]

Marx wrote of “the dictatorship of the proletariat" meaning the organisation of the proletariat as the ruling class, as exemplified in the democratic Paris Commune. Lenin, latching on to the phrase, interpreted it to mean instead dictatorship by the vanguard with himself at the head. He echoed the Blanquist theory of "a dictatorial power, whose mission it will be to direct the revolutionary movement . . . to be strong, to act quickly, the dictatorial power will have to be concentrated in as small a number of persons as possible". [19]

Rosa Luxemburg protested:

the historical mission of the proletariat . . . is to create, in place of the bourgeois democracy. a Socialist democracy, and not to destroy democracy altogether . . . The dictatorship of the proletariat consists in the manner of application of democracy, not in its abolition . . . this democracy must be the work of the class and not of a small minority in the name of the (working) class.

She was particularly opposed to “the abolition of the most important guarantees for a healthy public life and for the labouring masses — the freedoms of the press, of association and of speech”. [20]

Marx loathed press censorship: "the censored press . . . is a flabby caricature without liberty, a civilised monster, a horror even though sprinkled with rosewater". [21] Lenin’s dictatorship demanded it.

The Missing Link

Lenjn argued that “socialism" was a transition stage to “communism”. During this "rather lengthy process”, when "all citizens would be converted into workers and employees of one huge ‘syndicate' — the whole state”, the state would wither away. [22] This confused theory is contrary to the views of Marx and Engels, who both used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably.

Lenin asserted that "the first fact that has been established with complete exactitude by the whole theory of development, by science as a whole . . . is that, historically. there must be a special stage or a special phase of transition from capitalism to communism”. [22] “Science as a whole" had nothing to do with this “fact”: believing that the workers were not ready for socialism, since their class-consciousness had to be taught them by intellectuals, he did not accept that they could make "complete communism" work. That was "utopian” — so in the meantime, the aim had to be the “transition” stage.

In this "first phase” he decreed: “all citizens (would be) transformed into the salaried employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers . . . the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory . . . escape from national accounting and control will inevitably become incredibly difficult, a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by swift and severe punishment". [22] Russia did indeed become one vast labour-camp, but it differs from what Lenin claimed for his “socialism". Bureaucracy multiplied instead of disappearing, "equal pay" was soon abandoned, and "strict accounting and control" was replaced by widespread corruption.

The unpleasant reality of the totalitarian state was masked by theories about a "socialist state” — a contradiction in terms. The existence of the state ("the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” [24]) implies and reflects the existence of an exploiting class. The state in Russia has the same function as in any other country: "the main object of the state has always been to secure, by armed force, the economic oppression of the labouring majority by the minority which alone possesses wealth”. [25]

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Marx’s conception of socialism means that, as Engels explained, “with the disappearance of an exclusively wealth-possessing minority there also disappears the necessity for the power of armed suppression. or state power”. [25] Since the state in Russia has not disappeared, after more than sixty years, we must conclude that its existence is proof positive of the existence of “an exclusively wealth-possessing class”, and exploiting class.

Ironically, Lenin in 1917 wrote opposing "the widespread view that . . . state monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can already be termed "state socialism’.” [26] However regulated and planned, he argued, the system remained capitalism. On this, at least, he was in agreement with Marx and Engels.

Charmian Skelton

References:

1. Capital Vol. Ill, chap. x.

2. The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 1914.

3. Anti-Dühring

4. Quoted by Rudolf Sprenger. Bolshevism.

5. Inaugural Address to the International Workingmen’s Association.

6. Social Problems in Russia (1874), quoted by Daniel Norman, Marx and Soviet Reality.

7. Letter, 1877.

8. Capital Vol. I. chap. xxvi.

9. Socialist Standard, August. 1918.

10. The Peasant War in Germany.

11. What Is To Be Done? 1902 .'

12. Quoted by Sprenger, Bolshevism.

13. Communist Manifesto.

14. Quoted by R. Payne, Lenin.

15. Decrees of 20 Dec, 1917, and 26 Sept, 1918.

16. Speech of 2 Feb, 1920, quoted by Alec Nove, An Economic History of the Soviet Union.

17. The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1919.

18. Speech 28 April 1918. quoted by Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

19. Quoted by Martov, The State and Socialist Revolution. 1919.

20. The Russian Revolution, quoted by D. Norman. op. cit.

21. Quoted by D. Norman, op. cit.

22. The State and Revolution, 1917-18.

23. Left-wing Childishness and Petty Bourgeois Mentality, 1920.

24. Communist Manifesto.

25. Engels, letter to van Pappen, 1883.

26. The State and Revolution.

Marx's partner (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists cannot pay tribute to Marx without at the same time noting the role of his comrade and collaborator, Engels. It was Engels’ financial support which enabled the penurious Marx to carry out his researches into political economy.

But this financial support was not the least of Engels’ contributions. It is reckoned that about 1500 letters passed between Marx and Engels. They thought along the same lines, they spoke the same language, yet their life-experience was different. For Engels, there was the practical world of the Manchester cotton trade, he read widely, keeping himself fully informed of the latest developments in physics, chemistry and other sciences, with a special interest in comparative physiology and the controversies surrounding Darwin’s theory of evolution.

To Engels we owe volumes II and III of Marx's unfinished Capital, which he completed with difficulty from quantities of rough drafts and notes. After Marx’s death. Engels continued to publish translations and new editions of Marx’s works, providing prefaces in many languages. Yet it would be wrong to regard Engels only as Marx's editor, publisher and lifelong friend. His contributions to the socialist movement stand in their own right.

Many of the issues he discussed in his early work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, were taken up again by Marx in volume 1 of Capital. Engels' passionate indictment of slums, and the diseases and deformities of children at sweated labour (as in his analysis of the real cost of lace for fashionable ladies), such themes permeate his book. Yet there is more in it than indignation at the social evils of industrial capitalism.

Engels described how new technology and the division of labour were accompanied by the emergence of a new class, the urban proletariat. He posed the fundamental question: "What is to become of these propertyless millions who own nothing and consume today what they earned yesterday?’’ Industry, he wrote. ". . . regards its workers not as human beings but simply as so much capital for the use of which the industrialist has to pay interest under the name of wages”. Describing how competition affected the level of wages, he also emphasised the "cycles of boom and slump”; the Malthusian "surplus population” was the reserve army of the unemployed, available for industry's booms, and condemned to destitution and the Poor Law workhouses between-times.

Discussing both the value and the limitations of trade unionism (a theme to which he returned in some later writings [1]), and the main working class movements of the time. Engels criticised the English socialists for being metaphysical, lacking awareness of the significance of historical development. It seemed to him that they preached "philanthropy and universal love . . . the improvement of humanity in the abstract". He reiterated this criticism in his preface to the 1892 edition:

And today, the very people who. from the ’impartiality' of their superior standpoint, preach to the workers a Socialism soaring high above their class interests and class struggles, and tending to reconcile in a higher humanity the interests of both the contending classes — these people are either neophytes, who have still to learn a great deal, or they are the worst enemies of the workers — wolves in sheep’s clothing.

This first socialist examination of the effects of industrial capitalism, written from the standpoint of historical materialism, touched on many issues later developed in other works by Marx and Engels. Written in Germany on Engels’ return from two years in Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class has some faults. He was not able to check all of his quotations, and some are inaccurate; later, he acknowledged that his prediction that with the next crisis would come the revolution was “youthful ardour”.

Although the Communist Manifesto was published as their joint work, Engels himself expressly stated:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the w'hole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggle — this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx. [2]

One persistent criticism of Marx is that human behaviour is said to be influenced exclusively by class interests and material factors and nothing else. This is a gross distortion and Engels explicitly argued against such nonsense:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I has ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic role is the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. [3]

In much of Engels' writing, we find the dialectical method explained. He considered phenomena as evolving through often complex interactions. His conception of history was not a simplistic model of a superstructure of laws, religions, ideologies and dogmas perched on top of a separate economic base, with something like a damp course separating one from another. On the contrary, the various elements of the superstructure "also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form"'. [3]

Criticisms of Marx as an "economic determinist” arise from "the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction. These gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once a historic element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately economic causes it reacts, can react upon its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it" [4]. In Anti-Dühring Engels showed that science had revealed just such a dialectical process in nature. There are no absolute truths, everything is changing: "motion is the mode of existence of matter".

Anti-Dühring supplies a thorough grounding in dialectical materialism, applied not only to science and philosophy (attacking with gusto the nonsense about "eternal truths" propounded by metaphysical thinkers), but also to the development of socialist theory from "Utopian" socialism to "scientific” socialism. Some chapters from Anti-Dühring were soon republished as a pamphlet, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and the central section of the book ("Political Economy”) serves as a helpful introduction to Marx’s Capital. Both the book and the pamphlet had an immediate and lasting influence in many countries.

In his next book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). based on Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, Engels analysed the way civilised, class-divided society had evolved from barbaric and savage societies, and how property relationships changed family relationships. Engels also showed how the changing division of labour, with the introduction of herding, "forced women into second place": mother-right gave place to father-right. He showed how the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, so that the state "is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class". It follows that the socialist has no choice but to emphasise that every class struggle is a political one.

The superficial objection to socialism — that it is against "human nature” — is based on ignorance of the fact that civilised society, with its class divisions and state coercive institutions, "has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it (the state), that had no conception of the state and state power". Engels described primitive societies which managed their affairs democratically and without the coercion that is considered right and natural today. Such societies demonstrate that it is not "human nature" which requires humanity to be divided into nation-states and opposing classes, or which would make socialism impossible.

This article has only discussed Engels's main works. There were others which are both readable and helpful. How far was the theory of "Marxism” his work? His own view was emphatic and consistent:

What I contributed — at any rate with the exception of a few special studies — Marx could very well have done without me. What Marx accomplished I would not have achieved . . . Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name. [5]

Charmian Skelton

References:

1. Cf. The Wages System (Progress Publishers)

2. Preface to the German edition. 1883

3. Letter to Bloch, 1890 (Marx and Engels — basic writings ed. Feuer, Fontana)

4. Letter to Mehring, 1893 (Feuer)

5. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1886 (Chap. IV. footnote)

SPGB Meetings (1978)

Party News from the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the Spot at Con-Mech (1973)

From the December 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nor entirely satisfied with the mass media’s reporting on the Con-Mech dispute, I went along to find out for myself. As I arrived outside the Sheerwater factory, I saw a group of four or five men on the pavement. Among them I recognised Lindsey Greig, who is one of the two shop stewards. He is 21. A graduate of Warwick University, he joined Con-Mech this summer. From the company’s point of view he is a “trouble maker” and had “spent much of his working time soliciting membership for the AUEW”. The other shop steward, Ron Connor, an ex-miner from Co. Durham, has experience of trade union membership, but is also young.

Con-Mech is a small factory-cum-office on Sheerwater GLC estate outside Woking, Surrey. The Group make bread slicers and parts for bulldozers and other earth-moving machinery. According to a circular issued by Mr. Robert Dilley, the company’s chairman, on September 28th, there are 67 people employed of which he claims 51 are “eligible to join a Union” — any union. I asked him over the phone if this figure included staff workers, typists, etc., but he emphatically denied this. However the workers and the AUEW who have checked the branch’s books, assert that the total number of shopfloor workers eligible to join the AUEW was only 31. Indeed I would think that this is the correct figure, as Dilley’s 51 could only have got in with dangerous overcrowding. It is a small factory.

Before September 19th the union had only four members, of whom Ron Connor was one. At the branch meeting 22 Con-Mech workers including Greig became union members. Next day the union members elected Greig and Connor as their shop stewards and decided to apply for a meeting between the District Secretary Geoff Hardy (a member of the Communist Party) and the Company to discuss recognition, etc. The shop stewards’ account of how this application was met is indicative of the employer’s attitude:

Our first discussion with the Management was brief and to the point. We were told that under no circumstances would they afford recognition, and that the two elected Shop Stewards could “pick up their cards” on the way out. (Undated leaflet issued in the name of Ron Connor as Secretary of the Strike Committee.)

It seems that on every point at issue there are two different and mutually contradictory stories. How many shop-floor workers were eligible for the AUEW? Dilley says 51, the union only 31. How many came out on strike? Dilley says only 20, the union 26. How many are still out on strike now (Oct. 26)? Dilley says only 9 — the rest, he says, are either back at work or else have collected their cards and got jobs elsewhere. But the union say they are paying strike pay to 16 men on their books. Were the shop stewards sacked? Not according to Dilley, but it is hard to see why, immediately after their interview with him, there was a mass walkout and decision "to withdraw labour until such time as not only the two stewards were reinstated, but the Company conceded recognition”.

On September 28 Dilley took the case to the National Industrial Relations Court under Sir John Donaldson on the grounds that the strike constituted an "unfair” industrial practice because there had been no seven days’ notice. At which stage the question ceases to be a relatively simple one of an industrial stoppage over a recognition issue, but becomes bedevilled by the AUEW’s stoic masochism and boycott of the NIRC (surely they could have countered Dilley by putting their case on reinstatement of the shop stewards and recognition?), but also by the Labour and TUC opposition to the Industrial Relations Act and NIRC.

At which point I’ll get back to those pavement pickets. Their main motive for being out was nothing to do with the Industrial Relations Act and party political matters. What they wanted was union recognition, not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end, a means of compelling management to do something about unsatisfactory conditions. I was told of safety hazards on some of the machines, of poor ventilation, of the shopfloor being cluttered and dirty. I heard that rates of pay were arbitrarily and unfairly fixed — the longer you stayed the less you got in relation to blokes who had just come in on "outside” rates of pay. For instance, Lindsey Greig, a young newcomer, got a lot more than an older, better and more experienced worker.

Another factor was the high speed arrival and departure of shopfloor workers. There would be seven or eight new ones every Monday, and of these hardly a couple would still be in the place on Friday. There was a tendency to take young workers, including students, and there was a high proportion of immigrant workers — Italians and Pakistanis came to nearly half the workforce. In the event, the Pakistanis have mostly stuck with the union so far, but the Italians went back in.

In the absence of a union, inexperienced, young or immigrant workers are least likely to be aware of safety hazards in operating the machines, and in case of accident are unlikely to be aware of their legal rights on compensation; also they might not be in a position to press any claim. Is this why Dilley is so opposed to recognition of the union? Is he afraid that someone might report him for empty firebuckets? Or get him to modify some of his plant, e.g. the monstrous machine outside in his backyard which chops up metal into different lengths and which the operator can only switch on or off when inside the building? Or to give up some of his old-fashioned habits, like sacking people at the drop of a hat?

The first sentence of Dilley’s circular of September 28th claims: “For twenty-five years the employees and the management have enjoyed excellent labour relations.” The men totally disagree, and they point out that last November there was a stoppage lasting several hours over pay and conditions, which ended when another director conceded a pay increase. In the next sentence, we read: “the conditions of employment have always been superior to those laid down by any Union”. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: there would be little cause for men to stay out on strike with only £6 strike pay for weeks on end and still remain resolved to force union recognition if conditions were as "superior” as Dilley alleges. The men however know very well how badly their conditions and rates of pay compare with other factories in the area, whose workers are solidly supporting them (e.g. in such practical ways as laying on hot tea twice a day, or getting statements photo-copied for the pickets to hand out, not to mention helping out with picket duty).

The employer seems an awful ass, dogmatic and intransigent, characteristically the type who has been using NIRC. The Union leaders seemed at times to have had a stronger eye on making party policy propaganda for the Labour Party than with the immediate interests of their members on strike. But the strikers themselves have shown commendable solidarity and stamina — qualities which, added to socialist understanding, will overthrow capitalism and establish Socialism.

Charmian Skelton

Blogger's Note:

By the look of this obituary for Lindsay Greig from 2015, he would have been a member of the International Socialists group (now known as the SWP) at the time of the dispute. In fact, the strike at Con-Mech is mentioned in the obituary.

Workers versus the “Vanguard” (1981)

From the November 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In signing the Gdansk agreement in September 1980, the Polish government promised to allow independent trade unions, the right to strike, access to the mass media, free Saturdays, and to abolish the nomenklatura system by which the PUWP (the Communist Party) controls all important appointments. But paper promises and piecrust pledges are easily made, easily broken.

Every concession pledged on paper had to be struggled for. Last October the independent trade union was still being denied legal recognition. Free Saturdays and access to the mass media were still denied in January, five months after the agreement. When another strike was threatened, within ten days the number of work-free Saturdays was increased from 25 to 38 still less than originally agreed. Later the government “conceded” to the new unions 0.8 per cent of TV time and 0.2 per cent of radio time, subject to censorship.

Such concessions were wrung with difficulty from a reluctant government using every available form of dirty trick, provocation and intimidation. The union’s experience was: “Members are fully aware that . . . the only successes they had so far were in those instances where Solidarity was willing to stand firm. In all other cases there was no progress at all.” [1]

The Roots of Solidarity

“Nothing starts from square one: everything has roots in another time and another place”, said Andrzej Wajda. There were memories of the Poznan revolt when Gomulka came to power in 1956, and of the 1970 demonstrations over food prices and low pay, when Gierek came to Gdansk. “Just like the others I believed that they were real tears that ran down the gentleman’s cheeks as he spoke, and that while he remained Minister of Internal Affairs there would be no bloodshed in Poland.” [2]

But tanks attacked in Gdansk, in Gdynia strikers returning to work were fired at from helicopters, and in Szczeczin “the militia shot at random into the dense crowd of shipyard workers . . . They began taking the wounded away, and from that moment I became a union activist . . . We left the shipyard having won nothing . . . All that changed were the authorities at the top.” [3]

Gierek’s new economic policy brought a boom: foreign credits enabled industry to import machinery and expand. Each year 500,000 people left the countryside for the cities. In agriculture, the government discriminated against “family farms”. Private farmers were denied machinery and fertiliser, and the the state fixed prices too low for them to make a profit. The increasingly unprofitable farms are manned by an ill-equipped and ageing population, a third of whom are over sixty.

The tide turned in 1975, with rising prices and workers’ protests. Gierek introduced a new Labour Code, whose Article 52 was used in 1976 as an “anti-strike” law. He also changed the Constitution, stressing that “the Party is the leading political force in society”. This gave birth to an ‘‘unofficial opposition.”

In 1976 higher food prices caused strikes and demonstrations. Many workers were beaten, jailed or sacked. Some—like Lech Walesa—were blacklisted. In reaction to police brutality, KOR—the Workers’ Self-Defense Committee—was formed, and succeeded in getting an amnesty next year for all the jailed workers. NOWA, an independent publishing house, was set up to break the state’s “publication and information monopoly”. The number of uncensored publications increased. Along with other workers’ journals, the fortnightly Robotnik (The Worker) had a growing circulation from 1977.

In 1979 Robotnik published a Charter of Workers’ Rights, declaring that: “We have entered upon a course of action whose long-term aim is the creation of a self-defense system for employees, first and foremost, independent trade unions”. The Charter argued that the official trade unions did not protect workers, that Gierek’s 1975 Labour Code was used as an anti-strike law, and urged workers wherever possible to set up “free trade union committees”. [4]

Workers’ Grievances. . . .

As exports to the West dwindled due to the recession, repayment of Gierck's foreign loans became increasingly difficult. This brought pressure on the workers. Poles had the longest working week in Europe-forty-eight hours. The four-shift system caused serious mining accidents, due to lack of maintenance. In October 1979, at least 66 miners died in 4 accidents in pits using this hated system. [5]

Where health and safety were concerned, the official unions were as callous as management: “these matters were totally neglected by the old unions. Bosses ordered the workers to do jobs that could damage their health: in theory it was possible to refuse but in practice there was always someone else willing to do the job, and besides the bosses would take revenge.” [6]

Workers’ living standards worsened. There was a staggering increase in cases of TB, especially in the 23-25 age group. In Poland TB is still the main killer disease, reflecting poor food and housing. [7] The government admit that “nearly 2 million people are waiting for flats. The average time of waiting is 7 years, in many regions it exceeds 10 years”. [8]

Hunger was already a major problem last summer, made worse by hoarding and profiteering. One of the strikers’ “21 Demands” was for meat rationing. This summer’s hunger marches drew the world's attention to the fact that rationing did not end this man-made famine.

. . . . and the Gaffers

The official unions’ role was to enforce labour discipline by carrot-and-stick methods. For carrot, read the distribution of scarce goods, housing, welfare benefits, perks and privileges. For stick, read petty harassment, witholding benefits, fining workers and contriving dismissals. They acted as a branch of management against the workers’ interests.

Last summer the workers' anger boiled over: “the official trade unions have not only failed to defend our interests . . . they have been more hostile to the justified strike action than the Party and State organs.” Szydlak, chairman of the Central Trade Union Council, said, “we will not give up power, nor will we share it.” Their angry reply: “He wants to represent us without our consent . . . Our mandate is for him of no consequence.” [9]

At that time, Gierek was still preaching—like Callaghan, Thatcher and Co.—that “rises in the standard of living have to be earned.” Like his crocodile tears of 1970, this was a lie: just consider his standard of living. In only ten years as Party boss, he had acquired a “luxurious residence”. Gierkowka stands in 3,000 acres. Outside, an illuminated fountain and a 2½ acre lake. Indoors, a swimming- pool, cinema, billiard-room and a grand reception-room, all paved with marble slabs. [10]

Corruption permeated the PUWP at all levels. In Walbrzych, officials used coal-mine materials to build themselves villas while “other materials were being ordered from abroad and charged to the mines while going straight into the officials’ private building activity”. The regional Party secretary, no less, was up to his neck in this embarrassingly entrepreneurial activity. [11]

Workers died because money was used for private profiteering instead of safety equipment! For over a decade, the “red Bourgeoisie” fattened itself unscrupulously. A top sociologist described the PUWP as full of “degenerate elements” for whom Party membership was “a springboard leading to riches, to positions of importance and power.” [12]

Every foreman, trade union official and factory manager owes his appointment to a Party committee. Through the nomenklatura system, these have the power to blacklist him from higher posts. If he wants to get on in his career, he will be only too eager to do the Party bosses any small favours they want. The nomenklatura system is still intact: today’s black-market profiteering in food in the starving cities is a consequence of this.

But even without corruption, no party running a state capitalist economy — whether as a dictatorship or as a lukewarm pretend democracy (the Party Congress reforms were only window-dressing) — can be expected to act in the interests of the working class, regarding our living and working conditions as a higher priority than profits. Governments are not philanthropic institutions; no reform will change this.

Strikes in a “socialist” country?

Sociologists, like politicians, were baffled by this theoretically impossible phenomenon: “what rational explanation could be found for the fact that the rightful owners of the means of production, and the people governing the country, rise up in revolt against themselves?” [13] So why do strikes happen, and not just in Poland? Russia, Ukraine, Rumania. East Germany — all so-called “socialist” countries have this problem. No sensible explanation can be found among Poland’s rulers but workers understand things better.

“The strike is the law of the downtrodden, who have been deprived of all other means of social action. It is a radical act of self-defence . . . The historical experience of the Polish People’s Republic clearly proves that the power apparatus does not represent the interests of the working class. (If it did, how can we explain the events of 1956, 1970, 1976 and 1980?). . . Between the power apparatus on the one side and labour on the other, a deep class conflict exists, which causes antagonisms and conflict in the social life of our country . . . (Labour’s interests are opposed to) the politico-state and economic apparatus, acting as a whole as a collective monopoly, as de facto private owners.” [14]

Together with this awareness that the wages system, under whatever label, is against the interests of workers, goes the knowledge that Poland’s “Socialism” is a fraud: “State ownership and social ownership of the means of production are two completely different concepts which should never be confused. The means of production may be owned by the state but this does not mean that they are thereby the social property of the working class.” [15]

From this point of view it follows that “the real liberation of the proletariat can only take place by means of the socialisation (something quite different from state ownership) of the means of production.” [16]

This is a minority viewpoint but one which has real support. Jednosc, the journal quoted, has had impressive support from local Szczeczin workers, especially the print workers, and by January this year its fortnightly print run reached 100,000 copies.

The Vanguard Party and “Dual Power”

“Solidarity” can only act as a trade union, to defend workers’ interests within the system. It gave up any chance of political action by signing the Gdansk Agreement which, instead of the workers’ demand for trade unions “free and independent of the party”, declared that “the new unions . . . will recognise the leading role of the PUWP in the state.” [17] 

However, as no political organisation genuinely represents workers’ interests, any organisation which purports to represent their interests takes on the role of an unofficial opposition, whether or not it organises as a political movement or even has a declared platform. As one Party member commented: “Solidarity represents all those who define themselves as ‘we’ against a Party and State defined as ‘them’. A system of dual power is gradually emerging.” [18]

Solidarity’s policy has been clear from the start: “in the cause of independence we will not link ourselves, let alone subordinate ourselves, to any political or social organisations.” [19] Yet the Government and its Moscow puppet-masters continually attack Solidarity as subversive enemies of the state. Such tactics are familiar to trade unionists here: Reds under the bed or CIA agents of Counter-Revolution, the same ploy used for the same purpose, to discredit union activists and prejudice public opinion against the unions.

Kania has made every effort to delay, minimise or renege on his signed agreements. Realising that — for the time being, at least — brute force, tanks or truncheons could not be used, the government strategy was to play for time while harassing, provoking or intimidating the union and its supporters.

The Chief Public Prosecutor circulated instructions on how to frame union activists. From his circular (leaked to Solidarity) we learn that the forces of “law and order” were in the habit of raiding workers’ homes to such an extent that “the large number of sequestrated objects — typewriters, duplicators, paper, and above all illegal publications — in some cases creates problems of storage”. Prosecutions were brought against workers distributing leaflets (“dropping litter in public places”) or wearing badges “without permission”. [20]

A Politburo member, Zabinski, privately reassured the security forces that Kania’s apparent concessions did not mean any underlying Wetness. There was a Machiavellian strategy behind the concessions:

“The aim was to quench the strikes, calm the nation and consider the situation later . . . (The workers' committees should) taste a little power: it will have a cooling effect on them.” Ending the four-shift system would cause redundancies: “these workers’ commissions are to suggest who is going to be dismissed from the mines. Let them do this untypical work . . . These inter-factory workers’ committees have to fire them. We have to involve them in a thousand problems.” He concluded: “We should see to it that, first, they do not get rid of Party members, second, that they do get rid of the ‘KOR’ people, and then the rest must be simply slowly broken up.” [21]

This strategy, whose failure is self-evident, is based on the special fear felt by all Bolsheviks when workers form an alliance with “intellectuals”. Like Lenin, Kania and his colleagues believe workers are helpless without intellectuals to lead them. Lenin wrote that “the history of all countries shows that by its own forces the working class can only arrive at a trade union consciousness.” [22] The corollary to this is that only if workers unite with “intellectuals” is there any risk to the powers-that-be.

In Poland the KOR intellectuals supported the militant workers, and vice versa. Did the result support Lenin’s view? In the Gdansk strike, the workers took the initiative and the KOR “experts” were much less militant than the workers. The “intellectuals” were moderates while “the workers were really very opposed to the system, to the point where they wouldn’t even touch it, still less reform it”. [23] The workers wanted a trade union that would be independent of the party. Negotiating behind closed doors, the experts presented them with a “definitely agreed” formula which acknowledged “the leading role of the Party”. The workers “were very annoyed ... (they) wanted to throw all the experts from the shipyards”. [23]

Lenin’s theory is insulting baloney. Workers can have a clear understanding of their real interests and of their actual strength when united and militant. The “experts” and KOR sympathisers were nervous of Russian intervention and more easily intimidated. (They were also more soft when appeals to the “national interest” were tried.) From fear of putting the cause of “free trade unions” at risk, they shackled the new unions with “the leading role of the Party”, which meant the continuance of the nomenklatura system.

One lesson of the Gdansk negotiations is that workers should do their own negotiating, openly. They are the experts.

The Self-Limiting Revolution

Socialists have a special interest in the development of independent trade union movements in totalitarian state capitalist countries. Embryo movements have sprung up in Russia, under enormous difficulties, and still operate underground, as used to be the case in Poland. [24]

In Poland the achievement has been greater, but — like Marx — we realise that “the real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever- expanding union of the workers.” [25]

We are not uncritical of Solidarity. Its policy is made by leaders. It is influenced by the Catholic Church, an influence which gives the “national interest” a higher priority than class interest. It has taken up the cause of the peasant farmers whose demands — higher food prices and private ownership of land — are in conflict with Solidarity members’ need for cheaper food and, ultimately, for common ownership of all means of production, including land.

However it has established a strong organisation of at least 10 million members, voluntarily enrolled, without any “closed shop” agreements or coercion of any kind. It is capable of defending workers’ interests.

Its existence has demonstrated that state and party control of the media cannot forever stifle the voice of the common people, and that police brutality and draconian penalties cannot prevent determined, class-conscious workers from striking and organising on the industrial field.

But, even if all Solidarity’s demands become reality, not mere promises from a Party notorious for breaking them whenever expedient, Poland’s workers would remain wage-slaves. Solidarity is not a revolutionary organisation. It is a trade union, whose role is to defend workers interests within the wages system. Meanwhile the PUWP still holds political power, dictates economic policy, laws, and — the ultimate sanction — controls the police and armed forces which protect the property of the state and which can be used, have been used and may be used again, to “defend the national interest” against the working class.

The PUWP’s power-monopoly will continue until Poland’s workers organise themselves for a political struggle as effectively as they have organised themselves on the industrial field. There is still work to be done. But until they get up off their knees, stop genuflecting to Popes, Cardinals and suffering Saint Lech Walesa, stop saluting the national flag, become deaf to appeals about the “national interest”, and take their stand exclusively on their class interest, they will fall short of becoming a revolutionary movement. They will remain mere heroes of protest.

Charmian Skelton

References

[1] Solidarity communique. Jan. '81 (Information Centre for Polish Affairs)

[2] Anna Walentynowicz (Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, winter-spring '81)

[3] Stanislaw Wadolowski, vice-chairman of Szczeczin Solidarity (Labour Focus, ’81)

[4] Full text in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, spring-autumn ’80

[5] PSC News (Polish Solidarity Campaign), March ’81.

[6] Interview with Two Gdynia Workers (Labour Focus, ’80)

[7] Solidarnosc Strike Bulletin, 28 Aug. (Labour Focus ’80)

[8] State of the Economy Report, July ’81 (Polish Press Agency)

[9] Solidarnosc Strike Bulletin. 20 Aug. (Labour Focus, *80)

[10] Information Centre for ' Polish Affairs, 14 May ’81

[11] Labour Focus ’81

[12] Prof. Markiewicz, Kultura 21 Sept. ’80 (Contemporary Poland, official digest of media and government statements)

[13] The same 

[14] Jednosc, no. 16, 12 Dec. ’80 (Labour Focus, ’81)

[15] Statement of the Inter-College Co-ordinating Committee of Solidarity (Szczeczin region), Jednosc no. 14, also printed in Kommunikat, the Warski shipyard workers’ bulletin (Labour Focus, ’81)

[16] Jednosc no. 11, 30 Oct. ’80 (Labour Focus, ’81)

[17] Full text of the “21 Demands” and the Gdansk Agreement (Labour Focus, ’80)

[18] Article by B. Rogowski, 14 Nov. ’80 (Labour Focus, ’80)

[19] Inter-Factory Founding Committee of the Independent Trade Unions of the Coastline, statement, 17 Sept. ’80, published through KOR (Information Centre for Polish Affairs)

[20] Full text in Labour Focus, ’80

[21] Transcript of secret tape published in The Free Unionist, 5 March ’81 — Information Centre for Polish Affairs

[22] Lenin, What Is To Be Done?

[23] Jadwiga Staniskia, Experts and the “Leading Role” — (Labour Focus, ’81). Her statement that workers disliked the “agreed formula” is supported by another “expert”, Geremek—interview in Que Faire Auiourd’hui? (no. 9)

[24] See Workers Against the Gulag, ’79 (Pluto Press)

[25] Communist Manifesto