Letter: Soviets and Socialists (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Soviets and Socialists

I thought that the article in your December issue on the International Socialists made a lot of good points. But one point I am not yet convinced about is your preference for Parliament as a means for the Socialist working class to take power over and transform society.

Parliaments as institutions don’t seem to me to suit the practical work of delegates, under the direct control of their constituents and recallable by them. Parliament is geared to the deliberations of so-called representatives, controlled not by their constituents but by rival Party bureaucracies who make all important decisions behind the scenes.

“Soviet” is only a Russian word for “council”. If by Soviet we genuinely mean a council of direct delegates, then surely this would be a better way of establishing a society in which we all take an active rôle in social affairs. If they were based on workplaces of all kinds, educational institutions, neighbourhoods and so on, they could easily be made as universal and democratic as you think Parliament is. Of course, you could convert Parliament and other State bodies into the form of workers’ councils, or you could develop the councils independently in the course of the struggle, or maybe some of both — I don’t think that is the crucial point.

The Soviets which existed in 1917 were not real Soviets in the direct democratic sense, but often little parliaments in which different supposedly Socialist parties — Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs and so on — competed for power. The Party leaders took the decisions, like in present-day Britain, not the workers. Otherwise how could Lenin and Trotsky have taken part in the Soviets — as delegates of fringe journalism? Lastly the Soviets were not a Bolshevik tactic, but a form of organization that Russian workers set up to cater to their needs. The Bolsheviks manipulated them (because the workers were not conscious enough to prevent them, and not because Soviets are particularly fishy organizations) and then suppressed them into tools of their Party dictatorship.

As far as State power is concerned, both your idea of capturing and using it, and the Bolshevik or anarchist idea of “smashing” it, seem to assume that the armed forces are things which must be seized or destroyed. But isn’t State power not a thing, but a form of social behaviour by which we all allow ourselves to be things, the blind tools of others? Surely conscious organized Socialists won’t allow themselves to be used against the revolution — in the armed forces (if they still exist) or in the industries and services which support the forces? State power would fade away.

By the way, do members of the SPGB have views on this or other subjects (Women’s Lib. etc.) which are different from the Party line — or have members differed on interesting issues in the recent past? If so, do they have the right to express minority views, clearly labelled as such, in the Socialist Standard? It would improve your journal still more if the ideas were sometimes discussed from more than one point of view. Otherwise some readers may gain the false impression that Socialists are all identical in their attitudes, without variety.

Cicely Joyce 

London N.10

Reply:

The capitalist class have economic power because they have political power and not the other way round. They control the state machine and the armed forces through Parliament and are confirmed in their control by the working class at election times.

We are organized as a political party not out of preference (which implies that there are other ways of achieving our object) but because all the evidence of history and an analysis of capitalist society shows that this is the only way to achieve working-class emancipation. Without first gaining control of the state (the public organ of coercion and repression) through which the capitalists maintain their privileged relationship to the means of life by keeping the working class in its propertyless position, any minority movement seeking to challenge them will inevitably be beaten by the armed forces and the police who remain under the control of the capitalist class.

It does not follow that because Parliament is at present an institution of so-called “representatives” it must necessarily remain so. Once a working class who know what they want and how to get it send their delegates to Parliament with a mandate to capture political control of the state machine, it will cease to function as an instrument of class rule and become the indispensable instrument for our emancipation.

Soviets cannot establish Socialism

1. because they are economic organizations and not political; and
2. because they are based on the workplace, not on the centre of political power (See Gilmac’s articles in the Socialist Standard for January and February, and Horatio’s article in the October Socialist Standard.)

Before an electoral demonstration of a Socialist majority, Socialist ideas will have penetrated all strata of society — including central and local government, the police and the armed forces and this would strengthen the growing demand for Socialism.

However, control of the state machine is necessary

1. to lop off its repressive features; and in order:
2. to prevent any possibility of their being used in desperate attempts by counter-revolutionary groups to frustrate the wishes of the majority.

Armed forces will continue as long as capitalism because capitalism needs them. The capitalist class won't simply give up armed forces in the face of opposition. That is, they will still exist until consciously done away with.

On your final point we must point out that membership of the SPGB is dependent on acceptance of our aims and object set out in our Declaration of Principles. No-one is forced to join or prevented from leaving through disagreement. What for example would be the point of an advocate of minority action attempting to join the SPGB, other than possibly to be disruptive? Such a person is at liberty to join organizations which advocate his or her views. Party members finding themselves in disagreement with the Declaration of Principles invariably leave the Party — what would be the point in remaining in an organization dedicated to a method and object with which you disagree?

New situations faced by the SPGB have to be thrashed out, e.g. the Russian revolution of 1917, the rise of CND etc. The Socialist Standard is under the control of the whole of the membership and must reflect the democratically arrived-at Party case. The Socialist Standard does not exist to propagate anti-Socialist views — these are to be found in abundance elsewhere.

Editors.

Letter: “Socialism’s prospects have never been better” (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Socialism’s prospects have never been better”

In 1995 I moved to the ‘City of Three Revolutions,’ as St Petersburg was known in Soviet times, and lived there for ten years. Although my antennas were always up for signals of a socialist spirit, or even just the memory of one, they registered none. My reaction was to dive deeper into the history of the revolution. I began noticing things about it that were out of sync with my reading of Marx and Engels, like the fact that almost all the top Bolsheviks were from the upper class, not to mention that what they did to the workers they were supposedly leading to communism was far worse than what they had suffered under their old masters.

Lenin brought his Bolshevik Party to power on the cresting wave of the democratic workers’ councils in 1917. Then, with a few changes, he essentially restored tsarist autocracy. Freedom of speech, the press, and assembly were again suppressed, and the absolute power of a non-elected monarch, a dictator, reappeared along with a centralized bureaucracy. Under Lenin, the chinovnik-bureaucrat apparatus once more became the master of the land and of thousands of industrial enterprises. It included many tsarist bureaucrats, who, together with a few Bolsheviks, were the bosses in the ministries. Lenin’s bureaucracy blended with the tsarist bureaucracy and quickly adopted the same rules. Everything that upset or challenged the interests of centralized economic and socio-political life was eliminated.

Naturally, the USSR presented itself as socialist. From the standpoint of capitalists the world over, this was confirmed by the abolition of private property and the free market. For Soviet workers, however, their government, though endlessly spewing Marxist phraseology, was a harsh exploiter. The USSR had very little in common with socialism, if by this we mean a society without exploitation and classes. Abolition of private property and nationalization of the means of production are not socialism if the direct producers do not control the economy. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a union because Moscow ruled despotically over the regions. It was not soviet because the Bolsheviks eliminated the workers’ councils. It was not socialist as workers’ self-management was destroyed. And it was not republican because there were no free elections. Every word in this ‘USSR’ was a bald lie.

German and Dutch Marxists, including among others, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches, Paul Levy, Franz Mehring, Otto Rühle, Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, exercised an early criticism of the concept Lenin elaborated in his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? whereby a highly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries would ‘substitute’ for the working class and carry out a socialist revolution in its name. They insisted that socialism was not a party affair and argued that all political parties – even those identifying as socialist – are inherently bourgeois in nature because they always have a hierarchy with leaders who make all the important decisions and followers who do as they are told. The very idea of the political party was a violation of the credo and collectivist spirit of socialism.

For the longest time, I could not understand the phenomenon of well-off, usually well-educated, individuals leading revolutions, people like Lenin, Trotsky, Castro, Guevara, and Mao. The answer is self-evident, but it took me a while to realize this. Intellectuals have two routes to power. One is to join the establishment and work to preserve and extend it in the spirit of Niccolo Machiavelli. For the more daring or desperate, the other way is to lead a revolution and make the establishment theirs. Leftists, including Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists and other ‘ists’ have a special interest in state capitalism, are based on the exploitation of and rule over the workers, and make up capitalism’s ‘radical’ left wing.

Since the Paris Commune of 1871, the world’s workers have not discovered any other form of revolutionary organization than the council. Councils know no hierarchy, all decisions are taken collectively, and their representatives answer only to their members. This is the form in which the social-revolutionary workers’ movement has clothed itself – like the soviets that were shut down and swept away by the Bolsheviks in 1917-1921, and the similar elimination of workers’ councils (arbeiterrate) in Germany in the early twenties, the councils that were eliminated by the French ‘communists’ in 1968, Iran’s mullahs in 1979, and Poland’s apparatchiki in 1981, among many others.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not say, ‘Unite the workers of the world! They said instead, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Their audience were workers, not upper-class intellectuals with guilt complexes and political ambitions. Indeed, if they are to blame for anything, it is the sanguine hope they gave to so many that capitalism would spread across the planet and take root much faster than it did, along with the expectation that the victory of the proletariat, by virtue of its sheer size and majority alone, would be guaranteed and the world would finally lay the awful system to rest. In fairness to Marx and Engels, however, the first words of the Communist Manifesto, published in distant 1848, are: ‘A specter is haunting Europe.’ The confusion may be due to the pamphlet’s forward-looking last sentence: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ It is now 2025, and there have never been more workers on the planet. Moreover, the hold on them of political parties is largely a thing of the past. The prospects for international socialist revolution have never been better.

Evel Economakis

Reply:

Obviously we agree with your criticism of the so-called USSR and of Leninism but —equally obviously —cannot agree that ‘the very idea of the political party was a violation of the credo and collectivist spirit of socialism’.

The historical figures you list seem to have meant parties based on the principle of leadership such as Lenin’s vanguard party and parliamentary Social Democratic and Labour parties that ask workers to follow them as leaders by passively voting for them. We agree with rejecting that kind of party but most (though not all, not Luxemburg for example) seem to have ruled out the possibility of a political party — as a party contesting elections with a view to winning political control — which ‘know no hierarchy, all decisions are taken collectively, and their representatives answer only to their members’. This is the sort of party we advocate. Such a party is necessary as workers need to organise to take control of the state if only to prevent it being used against them but also to coordinate the changeover from capitalism to socialism.

We have nothing against ‘workers councils’ as such as bodies that workers have formed from time to time under specific historical circumstances, but we don’t see them as a necessarily socialist revolutionary form. Not all the examples you list have even claimed that but advanced various trade-union type and political democracy demands. That said, workers will need to self-organise also in the places where they work to keep production and administration going while the workers’ party uses political control to end capitalist ownership of the means of production.

Editors

Next Step for Humanity (2024)

Pamphlet Review from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism for Young Folks (and everyone else). By Jamshid R. Davis. Omnia Sunt Communia Press. 2023. 57pp.

The Socialist Standard recently reviewed a booklet about anarchism aimed specifically at young people. The review was largely favourable and ended by suggesting that the Socialist Party might itself consider producing a similar publication about socialism ‘presenting in simple terms what is actually a very simple idea – organising the earth’s resources collectively and democratically on the basis of needs not profit’. We now discover that Jamshid Davishas actually got there first with a publication (Socialism for Young Folks) that comes extremely close to our own critique of current society and our proposals for changing it.

At the very start, he defines socialism as ‘an economic system where the means of production (how goods are made) and distribution (how goods get into the hands of those who need them) are socially owned in common’, and where ‘distribution is not through markets but by free access’. Having established what socialism is, he then proceeds to explain (and denounce) what it is not. It is not nationalisation or state ownership or control, since that is simply state capitalism, where ‘government managers take the place of the regular capitalist bosses’ and ‘wage labour, markets, and money still exist and there is no free access to needed goods or services’. An adamant ‘no’, therefore, to, the dictatorships in places like China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. Nor do so-called ‘national liberation struggles’ have anything to do with socialism, since they ‘never were anti-capitalist in the first place’ and ‘socialism is by its very nature a world system’.

The class nature of the capitalist society we live in and that dominates the world is then analysed succinctly and effectively (‘a class is a group of people united by their common interests within the economic order’; ‘those who own property or manage it have all the power within a society, while those who do not own property suffer, powerlessness, economic exploitation, and poverty’; ‘the working class is composed of folks who must sell their labour power to capitalists or to the state to be able to support themselves and their families’). The solution to such inequality, we are told, is the abolition of class society and ‘the construction of a classless society’. The historical perspective that then follows about the rise of capitalism as a social and economic order and in particular how it overcame feudalism is also interesting for the added dimension it gives to the situation the world’s workers find themselves in today and what they need to do to do to bring about change and create a new system of society. It points to how past systems of society have changed, even though, while they existed, they may have seemed permanent and everlasting. Attention is also paid to the variety of noxious effects of the capitalist system on all who live under it. This includes a short but penetrating analysis of the various kinds of alienation it visits on its subjects and the way it stymies creative potential, the inevitability of crises of overproduction known as recessions or slumps, and the system’s tendency to cause military conflict through the struggle for markets’ (‘the First and Second World Wars can best be seen as a struggle between the various capitalist blocs over the division of the world market’).

What we have here, therefore, is an analysis and prescriptions found relatively rarely among who label themselves socialist but who are in fact using the word to mean variations, proposed or otherwise, on how to run capitalism. Having said that, there are, nevertheless, certain aspects of this booklet’s thesis that we would find it difficult to agree with. These occur largely in the section entitled ‘The Road Yet Travelled’, where a fairly detailed recipe for bringing about socialism and then organising it is put forward. It would be established, it argues, by acts of workplace protest, local democratic self-organisation and, above all, by direct action, which is likely to involve violence, since, the author insists, the capitalist class will never willingly give up their wealth and their protectors, the state, will never allow the system to be overturned and a new one established democratically via elections. So the strategy advocated here rejects the kind of democratic political action via the ballot box that the Socialist Party sees as the most fertile route to the establishment of a democratic, moneyless, marketless society once the necessary spreading of consciousness of the need for this has been achieved. Without this particular form of direct action (ie, the ballot box), it is difficult to see how a socially conscious working class can take the power necessary to abolish capitalism and set about organising a genuine socialist society. Nor is it a given, as suggested here, that, once the overwhelming majority of class-conscious workers have indicated their desire to establish socialism, there will be armed resistance from the capitalist class and their governments. So there is a clear difference in ‘strategy’ here between the author’s view and that of the Socialist Party on the establishment of socialism, even if the desired result seems very much the same.

In addition to this, the author goes in for a fairly detailed blueprint for how the new non-market, free access society will be organised, stating firmly, in the tradition of ‘Council Communism’, that it will be based on ‘workers’ councils’. Again we would see this as no more than one hypothesis out of many other possible ones and would argue that, once a majority of workers opt for a society without money, buying and selling, and wage and salary work, they will formulate their own way of organising it. All we can say is that they will do this democratically, via voluntary cooperation and using the knowledge, resources and technologies available at the time.

Despite these differences of view, however, there can be no doubt about the value of this publication both for the ideas it puts forward and for the clarity with which they are stated. It is helpful, above all, in putting centre-stage the idea the Socialist Party itself has been propagating for 120 years – that of dispensing with capitalism and establishing a new society based on collective production for direct use. As the author himself puts it – and we could not agree more –, ‘a world community is now possible and is necessary for the further development of humanity’.

Howard Moss

Revolutionary (2010)

Book Review from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary. By Ngo Van. Eds. Ken Knabb and Hélène Fleury. AK Press, 2010.

This book preserves the memory of a part of the history of the class struggle that might otherwise be lost. The author, Ngo Van, was born in 1912 in a village in what was then called Cochinchina – the southernmost of the three sections into which the French colonialists divided Vietnam. He came to maturity at a time of social upheaval. Peasants rose up against landlords and tax collectors, workers struck against atrocious conditions (the death rate on the rubber plantations reached 40 percent a year), and demonstrators demanded independence from France. These rebellions, and their savage repression by the colonial regime, are vividly portrayed in the memoir.

The political groups involved in the upheaval were very diverse. The Stalinist Vietminh were active, especially in the countryside, but there were many other anti-colonial movements that were not yet under their control. In the cities there were also several Trotskyist organizations. Chance contacts and revulsion against the regimentation within the Vietminh drew Ngo Van to Trotskyism and in 1935 he helped to establish a new Trotskyist group – the League of Internationalist Communists.

The Vietnamese Trotskyists were caught literally in the crossfire, hunted down both by the Sûreté (French colonial security police), who tortured and jailed them, and by the Vietminh, who simply killed them. The author was one of the few who survived by escaping abroad. From 1948 until his death in 2005 he lived in France.

While earning a living as an electrician, he remained politically active. In retirement he wrote extensively, mostly on Vietnamese folklore and Vietnamese and Chinese history. Several volumes of his work have been published in French; this is the first to appear in English.

In France Ngo Van progressed beyond Trotskyism to council communism. Articles that he wrote in 1968 on Third World struggles and the war in Vietnam are included in the book and express a point of view very similar to that of the World Socialist Movement. The book also contains helpful background notes and many photos, sketches and paintings by the author, who besides his other talents was an accomplished artist.

Stefan.

Letter: Anton Pannekoek and the SPGB (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the November 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anton Pannekoek and the SPGB

Dear Editors,

I have been reading the Socialist Standard for several years and was surprised to find the following statement in the October 2003 issue of your journal: 

“He [Anton Pannekoek] was optimistic that progress would lead to a great working class movement and political action to create a classless society in which all means of production and resources will be held in common by all people and used solely for needs.”

Despite the fact that Pannekoek was a council communist, there is no mention of any criticisms of his ideas. You will be aware of his statement that: “The so-called political democracy under capitalism was a mock democracy . . . Council organisation is a real democracy, the democracy of labor, making the working people master of their work” (Workers Councils, Part I, Chapter 7).

Anton Pannekoek rejected the use of political parties, and argued that the working class should organise into workers councils for the purpose of capturing power. This is in direct contradiction to the position of Karl Marx and the Socialist Party of Great Britain that the dispossession of the capitalist class can “arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organized in a distinct political party” (Marx, Programme of the French Workers Party, 1879).

Dr Pannekoek argued that the parliamentary action favoured by the SPGB was erroneous, and that through the formation of workers councils and a general political strike, Socialism could be obtained. Through the absence of any criticism of this viewpoint, I can gather that the Socialist Party does not oppose such a viewpoint.

That the SPGB is opposed to council-communism is shown in the following. In Questions of the Day, the SPGB showed 

“how secure is the grip Parliament has upon the armed forces” and how it is “necessary . . . for the workers to obtain control of Parliament before attempting to uproot the existing foundations of society . . . the only way to obtain control is through the legal one of sending delegates to Parliament”. This pamphlet argued against the views held by left-communists and council-communists that “the workers can set up their own machinery of government in opposition to the capitalist state . . . because in practices the capitalist class, controlling the armed forces through the parliamentary majority, will see to it that no hostile armed force comes into being to challenge their supremacy” (Questions Of The Day, SPGB, 1942 edition, pp76-8). 

The view of the SPGB is that if the working class were to set up councils and were to challenge the rule of the employers through these councils, our masters would have no hesitation in sending their armed forces to destroy such a movement.

It is not enough to agree upon the Object, but it is necessary to agree with the method of obtaining this Object. Thus we cannot hold a sympathetic view towards those whom adhere to the Socialist objective, but argue that this object cannot be obtained through political action in Parliament. If this is untrue, then the question is posed as to why Socialists do not unite with left-communists and council-communists.

Whilst I am quite sure you will agree to some extent as to what I have written, I still find it indispensable that we do not view certain opponents of the SPGB favourably, because of their opposition to Leninism in the case of Pannekoek.

R. Cumming, 

Glasgow

Reply: 

Your letter suffers from two glaring logical fallacies. First, because someone endorses something someone else says does not mean that they therefore endorse everything they say. Second, because someone doesn’t mention any disagreement they have with someone’s views does not mean that therefore agree with those views. Nor does it follow that to recognise that there are people outside the SPGB who agree with socialism mean that we should therefore unite with them.

So, no, you can’t gather from the fact that we did not mention (in an introduction to a pamphlet on Darwinism) that we disagree with the author’s advocacy of workers councils as the way to socialism that we therefore advocate this ourselves.

It so happens that an article by Pannekoek published in the same year as the SPGB pamphlet you quote gave us a chance to underline that, although we advocate sending delegates to parliaments as the way for the working class to gain control of political power, we are not a “parliamentary” party in the conventional sense.

As an article that appeared in the May 1942 Socialist Standard summarised Pannekoek’s position at that time (when he wrote the pamphlet on Darwin he held a different view, being a member of the German Social Democratic Party; later he was a member of the Dutch Communist Party until he realised that what was being established in Russia was state capitalism not socialism):

“Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch writer on Marxism, states his position in the bluntest of terms. Writing in an American magazine, Modern Socialism, he says: ‘The belief in parties is the main reason for the impotence of the working-class . . . Because a party is an organisation that aims to lead and control the workers’. Further on, however, he qualifies this statement: ‘If . . . persons with the same fundamental conceptions (regarding Socialism) unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussion and propagandise their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of to-day’. Here Pannekoek himself is not the model of clarity, but he points to a distinction which does exist.”

The article went on to say that it was not parties as such that had failed, but the form all parties (save the SPGB) had taken “as groups of persons seeking power above the worker” and continued:

“Only Socialism can guarantee the conditions of a life worth living for all. Because its establishment depends upon an understanding of the necessary social changes by a majority of the population, these changes cannot be left to parties acting apart from or above the workers. The workers cannot vote for Socialism as they do for reformist parties and then go home or go to work and carry on as usual. To put the matter in this way is to show its absurdity . . . The Socialist Party of Great Britain and its fellow parties therefore reject all comparison with other political parties. We do not ask for power; we help to educate the working-class itself into taking it”.

An article on “left communists”, including Pannekoek, is being prepared for the January 2004 [issue] on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the death of Lenin.—Editors.

Anti-Bolsheviks (2021)

Book Review from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Council Communist Reader. Radical Reprint, 2021

The articles in this collection – by Paul Mattick Snr, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, Otto Rühle and Anton Pannekoek – have long been available elsewhere.

They called themselves Communists as they agreed with Lenin’s break with pre-WW1 Social Democracy when he changed the name of his party in 1918 from RSDLP to Communist Party; some initially joined the Communist Party in their country. They had regarded what happened in Russia in November 1917 as what it purported to be – a workers’ revolution in which workers, organised in soviets (the Russian word for ‘council’), had assumed control of society. Within a few years they realised that this had not been the case but continued to call themselves Council Communists as opposed to Bolshevik-sponsored ‘Party’ or ‘State’ Communists.

Their basic position was that workers should abandon the parliamentary Social Democratic parties and trade unions and organise themselves in work-based councils both to wage the day-to-day class struggle and to overthrow capitalism. They became very anti-party and anti-parliament, which made them similar to Syndicalists except that they situated themselves in the Marxist tradition.

They were what Mattick Snr called ‘Anti-Bolshevik Marxists’ (among which we can be included), regarding Russia under the Bolsheviks (Trotsky as well as Stalin) as state capitalism and opposing Lenin’s vanguard party concept. They weren’t always clear on the implications of a post-capitalist, communist society, some of them drawing up elaborate schemes for labour-time accounting and labour-money (not included here).

Annoyingly, Paul Mattick Jnr repeatedly refers in his introduction to the German Social Democrats who took political control in Germany immediately after the end of WW1 as ‘socialists’. He must surely know they weren’t.

Adam Buick

Letters: Sinead O’Connor (1993)

Letters to the Editors from the February 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sinead O’Connor

Dear Editors,

It was wonderful to see the article on Sinead O’Connor in the January Socialist Standard. I wasn’t aware just how clearly she had come out about the money system, and it is very heartening to think that this stuff is getting discussed.

I had been more conscious of her strong feelings about the abusive upbringing of children. and your article has inspired me to set out my ideas about how the two areas relate to each other. I hope I can put this fairly succinctly.

To live under capitalism is to live for some other purpose than our own fulfilment, as Erich Fromm recognises. We strive and suffer, not to grow more fully ourselves, but to amass figures on a screen somewhere. Our lives only have meaning, and our needs will only be met, if someone else can extract some value from us.To live is to be used.

Does this not echo the reality of a child whose parents simply use her to carry their hopes and fears, and do not value her for who she is? Perhaps capitalism can be seen as a big abstract parent, telling us what we can’t have, punishing us for not being good enough. In the face of this system, our deepest needs have to be set aside as we try to satisfy its endlessly changing demands.

I have great respect for the Socialist Party’s realism in facing the fact that workers choose capitalism, that we arc often resistant to ideas of liberation, no matter how rationally argued. Perhaps our acceptance of such a punitive social system is merely our replaying in a different form our punitive childhoods. The resistance to change and new ideas certainly has a very rooted quality to it. I am conscious that you may react with suspicion to these suggestions on the grounds that 1 may appear to be saying “It’s not a matter of economics, but of personal insight”. But I’m not saying that. As long as we have a money system, leaders, coercion. countries, buying and selling and all the rest of it, then humanity will be held back from realising our true potential. and poverty and violence will remain endemic. What I am saying is that this personal dimension seems to me to be a hidden obstacle on the road to a truly free and humanistic society.

I am a parent myself, and no stranger to the pain of wondering if I’m being as supportive and respectful towards my children as they need me to be. Maybe sticking with what we know is a way of avoiding the fear of looking at who we are and how we relate to other people. Maybe the struggle towards a healthy society is connected with the struggle to become healthy individuals.

In any event, best of luck to you (and best of luck to Sinead O'Connor).

Peter Rigg

Nelson, Lancs

Reply:
Rest assured, we don't regard the ideas of Erich Fromm with suspicion. Quite the contrary, in fact—Editors.


Class War again

Dear Comrades,
It was a pleasure to read your article on “The Politics of Class War”. The subject was dealt with very sympathetically and I hope that any members of the CWF who happen to read it. take up your offer to discuss their views further.

Although the article stated that the CWF attracted the attention of the tabloids down South, I had never heard of them or seen any reference to their organization in the Scottish Press—although, admittedly, I am out of touch with political affairs.

Nonetheless, their viewpoint as stated in your article seemed familiar. About fifty years ago when 1 was active in working class politics, there was a European organization—I think they called themselves “Council Communists" or Spartacists (I can’t recall which)—whose literature was sold by a Glasgow organization the "Workers Open Forum”. The “Open Forum” was just that—an open forum which provided a platform for all shades of working class opinion. Every Sunday evening workers could go to the Open Forum and hear speakers from the SPGB. the SLP, the ILP, the CPGB, the Anarchist Federation, the RCP and the Labour Party. Its committee also organized debates between the various organizations mentioned. Literature from these organizations was sold at all these meetings. As you will appreciate there was little opposition from the “Telly" in those days and the meetings were well attended.

It was at these meetings that I obtained the literature of the Council Communists and, speaking from a somewhat snaky memory, I recollect that their views were similar to the CWF. The exponents of their case that I most remember were Anton Pannekoek, a Dutch astronomer, who dealt with philosophical and scientific matters, and Paul Mattick who dealt with economics. I remember them mostly for their articles in the Western Socialist.

I further recollect that they organized a meeting, either in Paris or Amsterdam, to which the SPGB was invited as an observer. The Executive Committee of that time (some forty or so years ago) declined the invitation. At the time I thought the EC were mistaken in their attitude but I can no longer remember the arguments.

Can it be that the CWF are the modern counterparts of the Council Communists? Whether they are nor not, I hope that your invitation to a dialogue is taken up.

Bob Russell

Glasgow

Reply:
As far as we know there is no direct connexion between the Council Communist group you mention and Class War— Editors.


Dear Editors,

Reading the October issue I thought I'd outline a few political points regarding Class War and anti-fascism, and the naive line of the Socialist Party.

I feel there is a great misunderstanding of the transformatory process, and the tasks to be carried out by the revolutionary working class. A revolution will entail new forms of power being used by the working class; both externally for the political struggle against the class enemy/counter-revolutionary forces, and internally for the control of anti-social behaviour (as I do not believe it will disappear overnight).

The sorts of working class active units I have in mind are closely related to the local workers councils or general assemblies. These decision-making bodies monitor the decisions made; and continuous action from, by and for the class is run by the local working class active units. Accountability in the struggle guides effective working class action on problems faced, and methods used in the past to see if they're working properly, and to devise new tactics if necessary.

“Punishment” may include violence if the class enemy is involved, and educative measures within the working class (historically this is the case). This does depend upon the particular situation facing the class though.

Also, no-go areas are not the only revolutionary strategy Class War has. I envisage widespread strikes, demonstrations, pickets, riots etc. Imagining that "the capitalist minority will be likely to cave in peacefully” is unrealistic, lacking historical backup, missing the range of bourgeois forces lined up against the working class, and the levels that they have dropped to and will drop to again.

You also misunderstand the nature of anti-fascist violence (back page, Socialist Standard, October), violence is only fascist if it is used with fascist ideas and intentions behind it. Anti-fascist violence is done with revolutionary working class ideas behind it, being one of the elements of revolutionary working class strategy.

Gerry Gable (bigwig of Searchlight) is against giving a (bourgeois) democratic platform to fascists; he recently said “I was in Germany recently and the coverage they were receiving was disgraceful. They would show young thugs attacking refugee hostels,' which was okay—it showed them for the mindless fools they are but then they would return to the studio and some well-dressed articulate neo- nazi would go on to justify these attacks in what some people would accept as a plausible fashion”. One of the working class anti-fascist strategies is no platform for fascists, the others being education and agitation.

Finally, I suggest Socialist Standard readers read The Coercive State by Hillyard and Smith. It’s a bit liberal but it carries lots of useful information on the "State of Democracy". Since it was published, however, things have got worse—people off the electoral register because of poll tax, etc. The message to be drawn is that we will never win on their terms.

I support Class War (and class warfare) because it is the war to end all wars!

Dave Clark

East London Class War 

London E8

Reply:
The danger in the "transformatory tasks” outlined is that the revolutionaries punishing, educating and guiding the rest of the population might well take on the authoritarian attitudes of a new ruling class. The only way to avoid this is to ensure that no revolution proceeds unless and until a majority of workers understand and want it. It is Class War’s failure to see the crucial importance of conscious majority action which could lead them, like "revolutionaries” in the past, into the rut of leadership tactics.

We do not agree that only intentionally fascist violence is fascistic. We are hostile to fascists, not least for their policy of dragging working-class politics into the mire of violence, and we shall play our part in defeating their pernicious ideology, using the force of scientific reason. (See the article "What the Fascists Need” elsewhere in this issue).

We have read the book which you recommend, which does indeed offer a piercing critique of the viciousness of the modern British state. For the record, one of its authors is a member of the Socialist Party and can therefore be expected to understand what the state is all about—Editors.

Letter: Wildcat debate (1988)

Wildcat magazine.

Letter to the Editors from the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

I am writing to add a few points to the letter my comrade, MB, has already sent you in response to the article in the December Socialist Standard criticising the Wildcat pamphlet Capitalism and its Revolutionary Destruction.

Steve Coleman alleges that Wildcat "seems to think" that "revolutionaries will be in a minority at the time of the revolution". Had he read our pamphlet a little more carefully, however, he would have noticed that the sentences he quotes to supposedly support this allegation refer, not to the situation at the time of the revolution, but to the class struggle at its present-day stage. Later on we state quite clearly that the "primary aim" of revolutionaries "must be to get more and more people actively involved in the struggle", and also that "if revolution is to succeed, the great mass of the working class must become conscious communists".

To say that "No Leninist would disagree" with Wildcat's views on this issue is as foolish as stating that no Christian would disagree with the SPGB's attitude towards religion.

The question remains, however, how are the mass of the working class to become conscious communists?

One of the basic arguments of our pamphlet is that the seeds of the future struggle for communism are contained within the working class's struggle of today. Riots and strikes are part of this struggle. Steve Coleman scorns these as mere street fights and reformist sectional disputes. This dismissive concentration solely on the negative aspects of the class struggle throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Strikes, riots and other aspects of the class struggle are also an interruption in the everyday routine of capitalist "normality". In the course of these actions numerous practical problems crop up. In overcoming them, those working class people actively involved find themselves having to develop their own collective solidarity, imagination. initiative and organisation. The development of these powers — all stifled by capitalism — is essential for the working class if it is to have any hope of transforming society.

Furthermore, by changing people's immediate material conditions, collective struggle also contains the potential to alter people's perceptions of the society around them, and place in a new perspective the limited goals they originally set themselves. All of these things can be observed, to varying degrees, whenever working class people take action together to fight back against the miseries heaped on them by capitalism. The wider the struggle, the greater the potential for the development of new forms of organisation directly controlled by those involved in the struggle, and the greater the potential for the development of radical ideas not confined merely to tinkering with society as it is but with the ambition of completely transforming it.

This, then, is the revolutionary strategy proposed by Wildcat: a materialist strategy, based on the working class's pursuit of its material interests, and recognising that the source of ideas — in this case, revolutionary ideas — is material conditions — the working class's active engagement in the class struggle. By contrast, the SPGB's strategy is materialist only in the most abstract, general sense, and tends more towards idealist philosophy, seeing no connection whatsoever between the class struggle of today and the future struggle for communism, and thus abandoning the Marxist view of the class struggle as the historical motive force behind social change.

As a final point, I would like to take issue with Steve Coleman's case in favour of participation in parliamentary elections, which is that the working class must gain control of the state so that the ruling class cannot use the armed power of the state to crush the revolutionary working class. If Steve Coleman really believes that control of the armed forces is automatically guaranteed by control of state power, how does he explain desertions, mutinies and military coups? What use was control of state power to the Kerensky regime in 1917 when its cavalry refused to cut down the insurrectionary workers of Moscow and Petrograd7 What use was control of state power to the "democratically elected" Popular Front government of Spain in July 1936 when half of its troops sided with Franco's attempted coup?

Examples abound throughout history to prove that, to use an appropriate metaphor, the armed forces are not like a gun controlled by whoever has their finger on the trigger of state power. The SPGB believes that socialist ideas will spread throughout the working class, disregarding all "barriers” of nation, race, sex, occupation etc. Why then should it expect these same ideas to halt at the barrack- room door? Which is the more realistic revolutionary strategy: to appeal, as Wildcat does, to our fellow workers in uniform to fraternise with the rest of our class and turn their guns against our common enemy? Or to expect, as the SPGB seems to do, that workers in uniform will forever blindly obey the orders of the ruling class and shoot down their class brothers and sisters who are holding out the prospect of a world free for ever from war and oppression?

The SPGB should apply Steve Coleman's litmus test of what constitutes a revolutionary organisation to itself, and ponder just how "serious" its strategy for the revolutionary transformation of society really is.

Yours for socialism.

Mark Shipway 

a member of the Wildcat group

Reply to Mark Shipway (of Wildcat)

We have received this and another letter from a member of Wildcat complaining about our criticism of their pamphlet. We are pleased to read that Wildcat accepts that there can be no revolution without a majority of workers becoming conscious; why then are they so frightened of workers' support for socialism being tested electorally? Wildcat insists that "revolutionaries do not, under any circumstances, participate in . . . elections". If they accept that there can be no socialism without a socialist majority why do they state that "the revolution itself will inevitably be a bloody affair'. It is not "inevitable" that a conscious, overwhelming majority of socialists will be resisted by force. And if such a majority is so threatened, the force required to deal with a recalcitrant minority would hardly constitute "a bloody affair". Opposition to all elections and the assumption that revolutionary violence is inevitable are both classical Leninist positions.

Wildcat's support for riots and other futile struggles can be criticised on two levels. Firstly, it is improper for people calling themselves revolutionaries to urge workers to offer themselves as sacrifices to the truncheons of the police — especially as we strongly suspect that Wildcat members, on a day-to-day level, are not so foolish as to engage in riots. How has rioting ever helped workers to "develop their own collective solidarity, imagination, initiative and organisation"? How have they improved "people's immediate material conditions"? Secondly, by associating the struggle for socialism with acts of frustrated violence, Wildcat adds to the general confusion about the meaning of socialist revolution. It is wrong to suggest that our review opposed workers taking strike action. The Socialist Party supports strikes in working class interests which are conducted on sound lines but, unlike Wildcat, denies that strikes are a means to revolution.

The Socialist Party cannot be accused of ignoring the class struggle as the motive force in history. Our attitude is stated in our Declaration of Principles, written in 1904 and still valid today. Of course we are aware that some workers may learn to change history by materially engaging in class struggle. That is a different matter from riots, which are perversions of the class struggle: frequently they involve no more than one section of the working class attacking another.

We agree that workers in the armed forces will not be impervious to socialist ideas at the time of the revolution. That is all the more reason why the revolution will not "inevitably be a bloody affair". We notice that in Issue 10 of Wildcat, under a report about 16,000 attacks on policemen in the last year, there is a caption saying "KILL THE BILL". Does Wildcat regard this also as a useful means of struggle in preparation for the socialist transformation of society? Is killing cops — or just injuring them — a way of showing them that they are fellow workers in uniform? Or is this not sloganising, dangerous if taken seriously?

Steve Coleman

Beyond the Suffrage (2019)

Pamphlet Review from the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Sylvia Pankhurst on Socialism’. Socialist Party. £1.50 (£2.50 incl p&p inland UK)

‘Full and complete Socialism entails the total abolition of money, buying and selling, and the wages system.’ So wrote Sylvia Pankhurst in a 1923 article ‘The Future Society’ reproduced in this pamphlet, an article which makes it clear that she viewed socialism in essentially the same way that the Socialist Party does.

Socialism and communism are the same, she says, and involve common ownership of the means of production, with production for use. Capitalism, in contrast, involves many people engaging in unproductive work such as banking. It also entails such institutions as pensions and the Poor Law, and the wages system makes the worker’s life precarious and leads to unemployment. She in effect opposed reforming capitalism, though she discussed this in a rather confusing way as setting up a half-way house to socialism.

In ‘Socialism’, another article from the same year, also reproduced here, Pankhurst emphasised the idea of abundance, and stated that the aim was not to put new rulers in place of the present ones. Capitalism limits production: for instance, agricultural land is turned into deer forests or private parks, and much land is left vacant. Production is further limited because only a certain amount can be sold at a profit. Workers who could be productive are unemployed, and factories are idle. In socialism, in contrast, the land and other means of production will belong to all the people. Production will be for use, and every effort will be put to supply essentials such as food, clothing and housing. What is produced will be freely available, with no money or exchange.

The pamphlet also contains a review, reprinted from the Socialist Standard (November 1999), of Mary Davis’s book Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics. The review contrasts Sylvia’s position with that of the ‘official’ suffragettes led by her mother Emmeline (wrongly referred to as ‘Emily’), who advocated votes only for wealthy women. Sylvia supported universal suffrage and then, unlike her mother, opposed the First World War and was for a short while a member of the ‘Communist’ Party. She later abandoned radical causes and supported Ethiopia against fascist Italy.

The pamphlet’s introductory essay traces her political trajectory in a little more detail, including her work in the East End of London, her publication of the Workers’ Dreadnought and the various organisations she belonged to. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia led her to support soviets rather than the use of parliament and to oppose the CPGB affiliating to the Labour Party. For this she was fiercely criticised by Lenin, and she was expelled from the CP in 1921. She then went on to view Russia as capitalist rather than socialist, and in 1924 described Russian workers as wage slaves.

Sylvia Pankhurst ought to be recalled, not as someone who played a subsidiary but significant role in the suffrage movement or was an object of Lenin’s criticism, but as someone who saw through the propaganda of capitalist politicians and the Bolsheviks, and – for a few years at least – stood for the abolition of the wages system. This pamphlet should help to ensure that this aspect of her politics is not forgotten.

Paul Bennett

Dutch Left (2018)

Book Review from the December 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–68)’ By Philippe Bourrinet. (Haymarket Books, 2018, 636 pages)

Bourrinet traces the origin of the subject of this detailed study – ‘council communism’ – to the breakaway in 1909 from the mainstream Dutch Social Democrat party (the Social Democratic Workers Party – SDAP) of a group critical of its open revisionism and parliamentary reformism, to set up the Social Democratic Party (SDP) as a more orthodox Marxist party. What they objected to was the SDAP’s exclusive reliance, to improve the lot of the working class within capitalism, on parliamentary action, including deals with bourgeois parties. The SDP envisaged the workers using strikes and other forms of mass action to further their interests as well as parliamentary activity that excluded deals with other parties.

Bourrinet concentrates on the views of two of their prominent members, the poet Herman Gorter and the astronomer Anton Pannekoek (though he was active in the German party at the time and up to the outbreak of the First World War). The SDP was not anti-parliamentary. As a Left Communist himself, Bourrinet sees Pannekoek’s advocacy of mass strike action to try to obtain a more democratic franchise in Prussia as ‘paradoxal’ but that’s with hindsight. At the time Pannekoek was not anti-elections. Nor was Gorter, who stood for Parliament in 1913 (and got 196 votes). In 1918, by which time the whole political situation had changed, the SDP got two MPs elected.

In November 1918 it changed its name to the Communist Party. Gorter and Pannekoek remained members but, having become by this time anti-parliamentarists, were not in the majority. They both eventually resigned to support the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) formed in 1920 by people expelled from the German Communist Party for, among other things, taking up an anti-election and anti-trade-union position.

This earned Gorter a place in Lenin’s 1921 polemic Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Pannekoek had received a more favourable mention in Lenin’s 1917 State and Revolution for his view that the aim of the socialist revolution was to overthrow the state.

Pannekoek, however, did not share Lenin’s view that a new ‘workers’ state’ should be set up to replace the old state. Believing that the Russian revolution had really been the ‘soviet’ (i.e. council) revolution the Bolsheviks claimed it was, he advocated that, after the revolution, power should be in the hands of workers’ councils.

Bourrinet goes on to recount the rise of the KAPD, which at its height in 1921 had over 40,000 members, and its subsequent decline as it split into different groups over the roles of trade unions, workers councils and the party. Some were virtually anarcho-syndicalists. While the KAPD disappeared after 1933, the Dutch Communist Left survived as the Group of International Communists and after the Second World War as the Spartacusbond. But by then there weren’t any more of them than of us – fewer in fact.

Apart from their anti-parliamentarism, their post-war position was very close to ours, especially with regard to the need for the socialist revolution to involve majority democratic self-organisation. Their final position on Bolshevism can be seen from the titles of two of their books in English: Otto Rühle’s 1939 The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism and Paul Mattick’s 1978 Anti-Bolshevik Communism. Some of them came to see Russia not only as state capitalist but the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 as a state capitalist revolution.

Adam Buick

Party News Briefs (1947)

Party News from the August 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leyton Branch are concentrating a lot of their work in the parliamentary constituency of Walthamstow E. where a number of their members live. They are holding outdoor meetings there, canvassing the Socialist Standard and visiting their opponents’ meetings. Their branch discussions are going extremely well, one on “Nationalisation,” opened by G. McClatchie recently, was particularly interesting.

The Finance Committee at Head Office ask branches to send in their quarterly reports (Forms “C”) as quickly as possible after the end of the quarter. Standardised branch books, branch circulars and printed branch notepaper are available at Head Office and can be supplied on request being made to the Finance Committee.

Birmingham Branch are having a speaker up from London at least once a month during the summer. They have been holding meetings with their own speakers in the Bull Ring lately and are becoming established there. One of their members spoke at an A.E.U. meeting at the end of June, and other members took part in the discussion. C. Lestor was there for a week-end and, assisted by the local members, held three successful meetings in the Bull Ring.

National Posters giving the party angle on the Government’s “Work or want” posters are now ready. Branches should write in to the Publicity Committee for supplies.

The State of Party Funds was given serious consideration by the Executive Committee during the month. The first step taken was to set up a Party Funds Committee to do whatever is possible to stimulate the flow of money into the party. The position is serious and the Executive Committee are now compelled to scrutinise all proposed expenditures with ever greater care than before. One effect of the shortage of money has been that the Executive Committee have been compelled to delay calling for nominations for the vacant post of Propagandist /Organiser, from which D. Fenwick had to resign for personal reasons. Party activity increases all the time, but we must have funds to back it up.

Bradford Branch are having C. Lestor with them for a month during the summer. They have been holding a number of outdoor meetings on the Bradford Car Park, a station opened up when Lestor was the propagandist/organiser in the area. The local Conservatives, who hold two outdoor meetings a week there, now carefully point out that we are not the people to whom they allude when they talk about “socialists.” It is to be hoped that before long our opponents will learn to call things by their proper names, and stop trying to discredit socialism by giving the Labour party a name which they do not earn by their practice, policy or objectives.

The Communist Council of Holland (Spartacus Group) have now sent a report of the conference held by various groups in Brussels at Whitsun. This is being translated from French, and main points from the report will be sent to branches. From the report it appears that the conference dealt at length with statements received from other organisations but practically ignored the one we sent. The only reference to us is that the letter we sent was noted by the Conference.

A Good Selection of Marxist Classics is on order from Charles H. Kerr & Co. of Chicago, and will be available for sale at Head Office when it arrives. A number of the books have been practically unobtainable in this country since the beginning of the war, and members will have an opportunity of building up their libraries with books which all socialists should have.

Paddington Branch filled Paddington Town Hall for their “Work and Want” meeting on July 3rd. This was particularly encouraging as their principle means of advertising, a loud speaker van, broke down three days before the meeting. Questions and discussion centred largely on the workers' struggles against the employers on the industrial field, probably due to the possibility of a London bus strike starting the next week-end. The speaker emphasised the view that effective strike action depended in a large measure on the extent to which workers understood their identity of interests as against the employers.

Sir Waldron Smithers, M.P., had second thoughts about debating with a party representative for a third time. A week before the debate he had undertaken at Edgware, he sent the Edgware branch a telegram saying that he would not appear. He gave no reasons and sent no apology to the audience of over 100 who attended. Like Beverley Baxter (see July Socialist Standard) he lacks both courage and courtesy. The party representative, C. May, carried on with the meeting on his own, as the local Conservative Association were not prepared to supply a substitute. The audience were sympathetic to the way in which we dealt with the Conservative party from the platform, and donated a collection of £3 15s. 0d. A considerable amount of party literature was sold.

Hackney Branch challenged the Co-operative party to debate, who re-acted favourably at first but subsequently climbed down. As an alternative the Co-operative party suggested that they should send a speaker to Hackney branch, which Hackney accepted provided that the Co-operative party would receive one of our speakers. This was agreed to, and the Co-operative speaker had the doubtful pleasure of meeting about 40 party members and sympathisers who during discussion gave him the socialist attitude to the Co-operative movement. The return date is being awaited, but so far no news has been received from the Co-operative party on this subject. A report of Hackney’s debate with the Revolutionary Communist Party at Bethnal Green Central Library on July 16th will be in next month’s Socialist Standard.

Palmers Green Branch's debate with the Labour Party at Edmonton Town Hall on July 14th was very successful. There was an audience of about 500, a large amount of literature was sold and a collection of £13 6s. 0d. was taken. E. F. Durbin, Labour M.P. for Edmonton, spent most of his time in attacking a special mythical “Marxism” of his own invention and seemed reluctant to defend the Labour Party. Our representative, A. Turner, after disposing of Durbin’s curious views on Marxism, went on to demonstrate the futility of Labourism, giving illustrations from the Labour Party’s record: he then put forward the Socialist alternative.

C. C.. Groves

General Secretary.

Mattick Again (1979)

Book Review from the February 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-Bolshevik Communism by Paul Mattick. Merlin Press. London, £2.50.

This is a collection of articles written by Mattick over the past thirty or so years. Despite his sometimes convoluted style Mattick is always worth reading as on a number of important points his views are very close to ours (though on others, such as using parliament in the establishment of socialism, there arc fundamental differences). He did in fact write occasionally for the Western Socialist in the 1950s though none of these articles arc reproduced here.

Particularly good is his 1947 article on "Bolshevism and Stalinism" in which he shows how Lenin and Trotsky had laid the foundations for Stalin's dictatorship and that Trotsky’s basic complaint against Stalin was simply that it was Stalin rather than Trotsky who had succeeded Lenin. And we can only but agree with the view expressed in the Introduction that "the revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China, were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense leading to the ‘association of free and equal producers'. but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism. Marxism served here as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist systems, which were no longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of the authoritarian state".

Adam Buick

"Workers' Revolutionary League" Please Note (1943)

From the March 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The December-January, 1943, member of Solidarity, the organ of the Workers' Revolutionary League, includes the following:—

S.P.G.B. Please Note.

But soldiers have a short way with legal niceties which stand in the way of military advantage. (Evening Citizen, December 28th, 1942.) (W.R.L.'s italics.)

We have duly noted this somewhat cryptic statement from a Glasgow capitalist newspaper, and in the absence of any explanatory comment by Solidarity, can only study the contents of that periodical with a view to shedding some light on it ourselves.

If the statement quoted has any meaning at all, it is that occupying or invading armies ignore the legal “niceties" (or provisions) of the region or territory they are occupying.

How on earth Solidarity or anybody else can dream that this invalidates the case of the S.P.G.B. is beyond us.

When victorious armies (soldiers) "have a short way" with "legal niceties" they are but overthrowing one legal code to institute another. They are imposing the power of a stronger state machine upon a weaker defeated one.

The S.P.G.B. has always contended that the workers, before they can impose their will upon the capitalist class, must get control of the Capitalist State machine by the only means possible, securing a majority of the electorate.

The Workers' Revolutionary League, as evidenced in its quotations from Trotsky's "Defence of Terrorism (Terrorism and Communism)" of 1920 (the arguments in which were so completely disposed of by Karl Kautsky) still deludes itself, in face of the colossal power of modern armies and air forces, with pipe dreams of a minority revolt of the unarmed workers against the armed forces of the Capitalist State.

We are naturally well aware of the fact that they endeavour to justify this, as Trotsky and Lenin did, with a lot of high-flown rubbish about calling on the soldiers to refuse to shoot the workers down.

Soldiers cannot refuse to obey orders, and remain soldiers. Actually, they have no desire to. otherwise they would not be in the army.

“Woe to humanity if we fail to tear the rifle butt from the hands of reaction at the critical hour," says a Workers' Revolutionary League spokesman reported in the same issue of Solidarity.

This mysterious "critical hour" is our old Communist Party pre-war friend "the psychological moment."

On the contrary, the rifle butts are in the hands of the workers now—millions of 'em, and whether Solidarity likes it or not, they, the workers, are "the hands of reaction."

Another contributor to Solidarity, "Icarus" (how well named, his brief flight into the realm of political theory ending just as disastrously), takes an anonymous contributor to a Left journal to task for stating that—

"Fascism is enthusiastically welcomed by a large strata of workers."
"Where? Only our comrade knows," says he.

Let us state categorically, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt owe their positions to the enthusiastic support of large numbers of the workers. They are unthinkable without it, and nobody knows it better than they do.

When, finally, we read that the Workers' Revolutionary League wants to tear the rifle butts, etc., to arrive at the "classless, Stateless Socialist Industrial Commonwealth, Anarchism," we perceive yet another example of a fact expounded by the Socialist Party for years—that confusion on means (violent minority, direct action) usually pre-supposes, and is in fact synonymous with a lack of any clear and definite object.

The object of the Workers' Revolutionary League is “ Socialist Industrial Commonwealth—Anarchism." 

Anarchism has nothing whatever to do with Socialism —is diametrically opposed to it. It represents the hope of certain reformers—Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin and Kropotkin—to convert the workers into small “independent" capitalists.

So the Workers' Revolutionary League, not knowing what it is aiming at, it is not surprising that it is completely bewildered about how to get there.

The S.P.G.B. repeats that the only way to get Socialism is to make Socialists. The rifle butts are all right—it's the ideas in the heads which have got to be torn out.

Horatio.

Bolshevism (2004)

Pamphlet Review from the November 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bolshevism. By Rudolf Sprenger, Redline Publications, 2004.

One of the greatest obstacles to socialism in the twentieth century was Bolshevism. A key text in that ideology was Lenin's 1902 book, What Is To Be Done? There was nothing particularly new in that work, being the general outlook of the Second International, but it did lay out clearly the idea that leadership was needed for a working class which was incapable of emancipating itself. Rudolf Sprenger (real name Helmut Wagner) wrote this eloquent demolition of Leninist élitism in the early 1930s, published in New York in 1939 and favourably reviewed in the Socialist Standard that year. Sprenger argues that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois rather than a proletarian revolution.

The pamphlet is priced at £2.00 plus 50 pence postage in the UK. Inclusive airmail price to Europe is 5 euros, and to the rest of the world US$7.00. Overseas orders should be paid for with currency notes. Order from: Redline Publications, PO Box 6700, Sawbridgeworth, CM21 0BS, UK.

Lew Higgins

Letter: Friendly Criticism From Holland (1965)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are no objections on my part to the aims of the S.P.G.B. as laid down in your Declaration of Principles; my difficulty concerns the contradiction there is between some of those principles, whose values are being defended and advocated in your party's literature, and the fact that your party contests in the general election for exclusive political power, with the only possible result of one day being sent to the Houses of Parliament. There they would either share the responsibilities of that “time-honoured” institution or, in the case of your party's representatives not yielding to the temptations carried along with these responsibilities, they would not be allowed to enter, on the grounds that they want to change the status quo. And rightly so, since Parliament, as indeed all institutions, are only there for the purpose of maintaining the order of things as they are, allowing minor reforms only so as to adapt the system to newly arisen situations, and by doing so keep the control in the hands of the ruling class. All that might change is the composition of the privileged few.

However, these are mere side-reflections. The arguments against parliamentary action are based on a Marxist analysis of the present-day class struggle.

In the past the antagonisms of the capitalist way of organising the means of production called up such appalling conditions that universal suffrage and its consequence—parliamentary reform—became the means of the working class improving their general conditions. It is a different picture today. Now the workers sharply distinguish between bringing out their vote for a particular party and fighting the class struggle. The former they do according to their political notions, the latter as a result of their being exploited. The latter is more interesting because it concerns the whole class. Since the trade-unions, and their political extensions the social democratic parties, have integrated in modern capitalism, the workers have had to fight them as much as the traditional institutions. Their memory of the days when they fought side by side with union leaders and social democrats for improvements, leads them as yet to believe that corruption is the cause; other, more active and radical men must take the place of the capitalist stooges!

In true fact it is not, of course, the corruption of the leaders which has caused the at-one-time working class organisations to turn into a boomerang, but the vested interests these organisations have in the existing order.

Born from social conditions that no longer prevail, they have grown into mighty organisations with the task of maintaining and expanding their rule over the working class. Pre-eminently they are the exponents of State-Capitalism and as time goes on they will more and more prove to be far more ruthless than any established institution so far.

I have tried to show that reformism has not come about because various political parties lacked, or lack, firmness of principles but because their very form and nature belong to State-Capitalism. At a rapid speed they are swallowing the old private capitalist, for whom no one needs to feel sorry, leaving themselves as the sole rulers of the world. Contrary to the more backward countries, Western Europe and the United States were in no need of a revolution to bring to power the new class of bureaucrats,—the joint stock company of intellectuals, professionals and the most dangerous of all the managers—they had already attained sufficient power within private capitalism that a smooth take-over seems preferable with a view to the danger of rousing too much enthusiasm on the side of the working class!

If then political parties, trade unions and other bodies of professional rulers are a sign, a token of class-rule, we must try to find out what forces there are that oppose all of them equally vigorously.

This leads us to the working class themselves. They bear in themselves the means to organise socialism, they are numerous and all of them are engaged in producing the wealth of the world, and last but not least: they possess an enormous storehouse of hardly touched creative drive.

As-yet the working class hesitate. Their actions are universally denounced as avaricious, subversive, unlawful and even anti-socialist. Their enemies are stronger than ever before, much better organised and have at their disposal an unequalled propaganda apparatus. Those who are conscious of what is taking place; who, stirred by the absymal wretchedness of the working class all over the world and of all people in general, have come to the conclusion that there is one remedy only: Socialism. And nothing less will do.

The SPGB stand for Socialism. Why should it uphold and advocate the idea that the working class can vote for socialism, while at the same time telling them that it's their task to build it? Moreover it supports the prevalent view as it is of the possibility to shun their responsibilities, with the effect that they keep on voting for the Labour party on the argument that it is bigger and more powerful!

Jos Van Oerns

Amsterdam

We have had to make some minor alterations to this letter, but only to cut out what Mr. van Oerns called “any errors of style and usage." The sense of the letter remains completely unchanged.

Editorial Committee.

Reply

First of all, we take it we are agreed on the aim: Socialism, a system of society in which all have free access to the means of production, a self-controlling world community in which the principle “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” prevails.

The question, then, is how to achieve this aim.

(1) Who is to implement it? A study of present-day society reveals that the class in whose interest it is to establish Socialism is the working class. This class, brought into being and trained by capitalism, now runs industry from top to bottom. It has no need of the superfluous owning class which lives off its unpaid labour. At present, however, the working class does not realise this. The present task of the SPGB is to help them to come to such an understanding.

(2) What grounds have we for assuming that such understanding is possible? According to the materialist conception of history the basic social relations are those of property, ultimately dependent on the development of technology. They give rise to classes and to class conflict. Social change comes about in the following way: a change in technology changes the mode of production and shifts the centre of industrial control, causing a new class to come to prominence. At first the struggle of this new class against the institutions and values of the old order will be purely an economic one. Later, as the new class becomes conscious of itself it will begin to organise itself politically. This organisation will be completed when the class achieves political power. The class conflicts generated by the economic structure of society always ultimately become political, i.e. conscious class, conflicts. The prize in all the class conflicts in history has always been, in the end, political power. This is the thesis of the materialist conception of history.

(3) Is this analysis applicable to present-day society? Certainly. The development of technology which was the Industrial Revolution and what has followed ever since has developed a new class. The economically important class today is the working class. The property relations of capitalist society give rise to a conflict between this class and the privileged owning class. Up till now this class struggle has been unconscious and purely economic. The working class have been forced to organise in trade unions to use in the struggle over the division of the product of their labour. Insofar as they art used for this purpose these trade unions have the support of the .SPGB. (Your comments seem to suggest that trade unions are wholly anti-working class organisations. In our view this is a dangerous oversimplification.)

(4) What of the future? Trade union action, the economic phase of the class struggle, precisely because of its unconscious nature, has its limitations. The history of class societies shows that the economic actions of any rising class have had a defensive character. To win they have had to organise consciously and politically. The same applies to the working class today. If they are to win, they must wage the class struggle consciously. This involves organising as a political party with a view to capturing political power. This is the case of the SPGB for political action.

(5) This view is based on a study of history and in particular of the role of the State, the seat of political power and the centre of social control. In the advanced capitalist countries, in order to ensure the smooth functioning of their system, in order to avoid interruptions of work by political conditions, the capitalist class have been forced (or, in some cases, found it convenient) to institute peaceful ways of sounding opinion and settling disputes. Disputes have been institutionalized in the voting and, for want of a better word, parliamentary system. It is our view that it is possible for the working class to use these institutions to settle their class struggle with the owning class. The vote is thus a potential class weapon. But the vote, like other weapons, can be used properly or improperly. Because at present the workers use it to elect demagogues and careerists of one kind or another is no argument against its potentialities.

(6) As far as we are concerned, what is important is not so much the vote as the understanding behind it. Thus, when we contest elections we do all we can to make sure that only convinced Socialists vote for us. A vote won on other grounds is worse than useless as the history of the Social Democrats of Europe has shown. The vote is just a possible means to political power—the goal of a class conscious working class.

(7) Clearly then our conception of political action differs from that of other parties and the reformists in particular. They perform any tricks and engage in all kinds of demagogy in order to get elected. Without a Socialist working class behind them, what can they do? Nothing save maintain the status quo. Hence the phenomena of "sell-out” and “betrayal.” It is completely irrelevant to judge the usefulness of political action on how the reformists have used it, not least because they operate on a different assumption, namely, that you can substantially improve the lot of the working class without Socialist understanding . When delegates of the SPGB are sent to the centre of political power they will be the delegates of the working class because the SPGB will be the working class organised consciously and politically.

(8) The point is that we are not a political party in the conventional sense of the term, we are not a group of politicians trying to get elected to do something for the working class, to pass a Socialism in Great Britain Act and legislate the new society into being. Far from it, in our view a Socialist party should not be a vanguard but an instrument. We conceive ourselves as an instrument which the working class can use to achieve political power, a necessary prerequisite for the establishment of Socialism.

Editorial Committee.