Why you shouldn’t vote state capitalist (2001)

Pamphlet Review from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why You Should Vote Socialist. By Paul Foot, Bookmarks.

Paul Foot is a good journalist, who specialises in exposing capitalism for not living up to its own standards. For this his fellow journalists chose him as “campaigning journalist of the decade”, even though he seems to have got it wrong about Hanratty. But let’s not be too churlish. Despite being a member of the SWP he’s a good writer and the first 50 pages of this 60-page pamphlet are an excellent demonstration of the truth of the old saying “Labour, Tory; Same Old Story” in relation to the Blair government.

Blair and his team have pursued the same policies as the Tory governments of the 80s and early 90s, not just on economic matters, which anyone with a knowledge of how capitalism works could have predicted (as we did, but not Foot – he voted Labour in 1997) but also on civil liberties, where governments have some leeway.

It’s in the last two chapters that Foot goes off the rails. He correctly states:

“Under capitalism, unemployment, inflation, the rise and fall of booms and slumps, are not brought about by governments, but by economic forces beyond government control.”

But also:

“Elected governments of whatever colour cannot and do not determine what happens to the international capitalist economy unless they embark on the most determined and ruthless economic intervention” (emphasis added).

It is just such a policy of state intervention to try to control capitalism that Foot advocates on behalf of the Trotskyist “Socialist” Alliance and the Scottish Sheridan Party (with which the SWP has just merged its Scottish section) who, together, are contesting a third of the seats in the present general election (in most other constituencies Foot says people should still vote Labour!). But, if tried, this would provoke an economic crisis and, if persisted in, would lead to an autarkic state capitalism with shortages and rationing as in Cuba and North Korea.

The alternative to capitalism is not “determined and ruthless” state intervention but socialism, a world-wide society of common ownership, democratic control, and production for use not profit. But Foot doesn’t offer this, not even as a long-term aim. Instead, he accepts a curious definition (by Michael Barratt Brown) of socialism as a society where, among other things, “housing would be available at reasonable rents” and “pensions for the aged and invalid, and payments during sickness and unemployment would be provided on a universal scheme based on contributions related to income”. In other words, the Old Labourite dream of a reformed capitalism. Perhaps Foot never really did vote Labour without illusions.

Adam Buick

Basic concepts (2010)

Book Review from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Unravelling Capitalism. A Guide to Marxist Political Economy. By Joseph Choonara. Bookmarks. 2009. 150 pages. £6.99

Zombie Capitalism. Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx.  By Chris Harman. Bookmarks. 400 pages. £16.99

Choonara’s short book is a good simple-to-follow introduction to the basic concepts of Marxian economics – from commodity, value, labour, labour power, and surplus value to rate of profit, organic composition of capital and price of production.

There’s the occasional reference to Trotsky and to the Russian revolution (Bolshevik coup) as a good thing but, after all, the author is a member of the SWP and the discerning reader will be able to discount these. Even so, it is surprising to see Mike Kidron’s “permanent arms economy” (that capitalism boomed after WW2 because wasteful expenditure on arms prevented the rate of profit from falling by slowing down the rate of capital accumulation) given another airing since it was so decisively refuted by the facts (those countries that spent less on arms boomed more). But this only takes up a few pages of an otherwise useful book.

Apart from the opening two chapters which cover the same ground as Choonara’s book and in the same easy-to-follow way, Harman’s book (published only a few months before he died in November) is by contrast dominated by Kidron’s theory. In fact, Harman (the No 2 in the SWP under Tony Cliff) applies the theory much more widely than Kidron ever did, using it to attempt to explain the course of capitalist development since Marx’s day. Thus the Great Depression of the 1880s only ended because of the naval arms race that began towards the end of the 1890s; the slump that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash was due to the fact that there was not enough wasteful arms spending in the 1920s to slow down the rate of accumulation; WW2 ended this slump and post-war arms spending avoided another one till the 1970s. Then? Well, the permanent arms economy proved to be neither permanent nor enough: “The permanent arms economy had to be supplemented by the debt economy” (p. 289).

Despite this unsatisfactory analysis Harman does make some valid points. For instance, to those who blame the banks and bankers: “Finance is a parasite on the back of a parasite, not a problem that can be dealt with in isolation from capitalism as a whole”.

Adam Buick

Marx’s party (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Rebel’s Guide to Marx. By Mike Gonzalez. Bookmarks. 2006. 60pp. £2

While factually correct on the details of Marx’s life, this SWP booklet suffers (as you would expect) from a significant distortion of Marx’s views.

Marx is made out to be a proto-SWPer, obsessed with “building the party”. In actual fact, while Marx did use the word “party”, before the 1870s it was not in the sense of an organised vanguard, but rather as those, whether organised or not, who wanted communism (or socialism, the same thing), more what we would today call a current of opinion than its subsequent sense of party as an organisation.

Marx did, during the period of Germany’s aborted bourgeois revolution of 1848-9, favour communists organising themselves as a distinct group to try to push the bourgeois revolution to its limits and beyond. But, once this period was over, he argued for this communist organisation to be disbanded.

Later, when he was active in the International Working Men’s Association from 1864-1872, he advocated the working class organising into a distinct political party. By then “party” had begun to take on its modern meaning and Marx was associated with an organisation in Germany called the “Social Democratic Workers Party” (SDAP) which, after merging with another group, became in 1875 the “German Socialist Workers Party” (SADP). (It later changed its name to Social Democratic Party of Germany – SPD – which still exists today, as a reformist party.) Marx referred to it simply as the workers’ party.

So, Marx’s conception of party was that of an open, democratically-organised mass party, not a vanguard of self-appointed professional revolutionaries.

Adam Buick

Western vanguardist (2006)

Book Review from the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Rebel’s Guide to Gramsci. By Chris Bambery, Bookmarks, 2006. 60 pages. £3.

This is a short introduction, from an SWP viewpoint, to the life and ideas of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader who died from natural causes in a fascist prison in 1937. Gramsci appeals to the SWP and Western Leninists generally because of his more sophisticated version of vanguardism than Lenin’s.

In his Prison Notebooks he distinguished the situation in Tsarist Russia and some other parts of Eastern Europe from that in the West. In Tsarist Russia, he argued, the state was everything and the ruling class relied directly on repression to maintain itself in power; in this situation the task of revolutionaries was (in Bamberys summary of Gramsci‘s views) “to lead a direct assault on power when the opportunity arose”, as the Bolsheviks had successfully done in Russia (only to install themselves, we would add, as the embryo of a new ruling class).

In Western Europe, on the other hand, the ruling class ruled mainly through the “hegemony” it exercised over the working class rather than through direct force. In Bambery’s words again:

“In Western Europe . . . the ruling class rested mainly on consent and was able to rely on a variety of institutions within civil society which organised and reinforced this. Gramsci described these as acting like a complicated series of earthworks surrounding a great fortress – the state. So institutions like the church, the media, the education system and political parties helped secure the consent of the masses allowing force to be used sparingly and only in the last resort . . . So these networks of support for the ruling class and the ideas they helped to reinforce had to be undermined first through a long ideological struggle before a direct assault on the ruling class was possible . . .Communists had to set themselves the task of undermining the consent, however grudgingly given, which allowed capitalism to rule.”

This is an analysis we can accept and indeed had made ourselves. But the conclusion Gramsci drew from it was not the same as ours. We concluded that, as socialism too could only exist with the consent of the working class, the task of socialists was to directly, incessantly and exclusively campaign amongst fellow workers against capitalism and capitalist ideas and for socialism.

Gramsci concluded that a vanguard party should seek to establish its own “hegemony” over the working class, by assuming the leadership of the workers’ day-to-day struggles.

Adam Buick

A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin (2005)

Book Review from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin. Ian Birchall. Bookmarks. £2.

This is an odd, 58-page top-pocket-size pamphlet. Odd because it is written in very simple language and seems to be aimed at schoolkids who might be influenced by anarchist ideas.

Thus, Birchall tells us, “Lenin’s goal was the same as the anarchists’, but he recognised that the path it would be complex”. Yes indeed, by means of the dictatorship of a vanguard party which would last for years and which would, supposedly, in time give up its power and privilege and abolish the state.

Birchall quotes from ex-anarchists who came over to the Bolsheviks such as Alfred Rosmer and Victor Serge and tells us that Lenin “spent hours discussing with anarchists such as Emma Goodman from the US and Makhno from Ukraine” and argued that “the syndicalist idea of an ‘organised minority’ of the most militant workers and the Bolshevik idea of the party were the same thing”.

This may have worked in the aftermath of the first world war and the Russian revolution to temporarily win over a number of anarchists and syndicalists, but it is hard to see it working today to get any budding anarchists to join the SWP.

Adam Buick

Russia: From Workers' State to State Capitalism? (1987)

Book Review from the July 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia: From Workers' State to State Capitalism by Peter Binns. Tony Cliff and Chris Harman. Bookmarks. £2.50.)

Most Trotskyites hold that Russia is a "degenerate workers' state". The SWP, however, of which these three authors are leading members, holds that Russia is state capitalist. So does the Socialist Party, but there is a fundamental difference between our points of view. As the title of this book shows, they hold that Russia degenerated from some sort of working class or socialist regime into state capitalism whereas we hold that capitalism was never abolished in Russia, not even in Lenin's day. and that state capitalism developed there as the leaders of the Bolshevik party responded to the pressures of material circumstances, eventually evolving into a new ruling class monopolising the means of production through the state.

The SWP deny that Russia was state capitalist before 1928. So what was it up till then? Basically, as this book — a reprint of articles originally written in the 1970s — shows, they are saying it was the "degenerate workers' state” that the more dogmatic Trotskyites still claim it to be. But this view is just as absurd in relation to pre-1928 Russia as the SWP admit it to be in relation to post-1928 Russia. The ownership of industry by a one-party state, buying and selling, the wages system, capital accumulation, international pressures, all existed just as much before, as after. 1928. The only difference was that by 1928 Trotsky had been definitively excluded from the Russian ruling élite with no hope of being able to get back into its ranks again. In other words, the SWP's explanation for the coming of state capitalism to Russia is political rather rather than economic and so on a par with the absurd Maoist view which dates the "restoration of capitalism” in Russia from the coming to power of Khrushchev after the death of Stalin.

The fact that the SWP fail to recognise the capitalist nature of the Russian economy before 1928 and in fact attribute to it some minimal "socialist” character must inevitably cast doubt on their conception of socialism. For what they are saying is that what made the pre-1928 Russian economy "non-capitalist" was the more or less acceptable nature of the then political system. This implies that another political change, both in Russia and the West, if carried out by insurrectionary means, could establish "socialism" even if the essential features of the capitalist economy — particularly wage-labour and capital accumulation — remained. That this is indeed the SWP view can be seen from their recent pamphlet The Future Socialist Society which says that one of the first things to happen after the socialist revolution is that wages will be raised. As we are also told that we shall all become employees of the state then it is clear that their alternative to Russia-type state capitalism is . . . another form of state capitalism. Their so-called "socialist revolution", then, is no more than a radical change in the political management of the wages-prices-profit system that is capitalism.

Having said this, there are still one or two useful insights in the book. For example Harman's observation that from the second quarter of the 19th century onwards all ruling classes in societies based on non-capitalist modes of exploitation were subjected by the world market to immense pressures to "change their mode of exploitation so as to subordinate everything else to the accumulation of means of production in order to accumulate other means of production" if they were not to be dominated by those states which had already adopted the capitalist mode of production.

Harman cites Japan as the only fully successful example of this in the 19th century when, in the 1860s. a section of the feudal ruling class "took control of the state and used this control to subordinate the whole of Japanese society to the development of industry on a capitalist basis". He then spoils it all by adding:

   In 1929 the Stalinist ruling stratum in Russia faced exactly the same dilemma: follow the logic of capitalism and accumulate in order to further accumulate or face subjection to international capitalism.

But. once again, what's so special about 1929? Are we to believe that this same dilemma did not present itself to the Bolshevik government right from its seizure of power in 1917? Lenin himself (who the SWP claim as one of their mentors) entertained no such illusion and openly advocated, in 1918 and again in 1921. state capitalism as the only way forward for Russia, while waiting for the world socialist revolution he mistakenly believed to have been imminent.

In the light of the Marxist perspective glimpsed by Harman, Russian Bolshevism can be seen as a reaction to the failure of the Tsarist ruling class to successfully carry out the subordination of Russian society to the capitalist imperative to accumulate capital out of the exploitation of wage-labour. In other words, the Bolsheviks — even if they did come to power through a social revolution involving a high degree of participation by the relatively small industrial working class essentially carried through the task of "the development of industry on a capitalist basis" that the old ruling class had proved unable to do. And this began under Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 and 1918, not just in 1928 and 1929 under Stalin.

Adam Buick

Socialist and trade unionist (2015)

Book Review from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'A Rebel’s Guide to Eleanor Marx', by Siobhan Brown. Bookmarks. 2015

Although marred by the littering of ‘fightbacks’ and ‘downturns’ characteristic of SWP publications, this is not fundamentally a bad booklet. The contribution of Eleanor Marx to the class struggle is satisfactorily documented, both intellectually through her work on women – identifying  socialism as the way to ‘woman’s emancipation’ solution – and practically through her role as a firebrand activist in the New Unionism of the 1880s. Eleanor was not just the daughter of her father but a player in her own right – indeed her union interventions put his own ineffective fumblings in the First International to shame. The boring intricacies of her personal life are, in the main, sensibly avoided.

Little potted biographies of this nature have a valuable educative function regardless of the dubious politics of the issuing organisation. It is a little jarring, however, to be lectured on the undoubted usefulness of trade union organisation, the inefficacy of reformism and the patronising leadership attitude (of Hyndman) by a party characterised by non-industrial, primarily student, recruitment, hugely reformist sensibilities and a thoroughly authoritarian constitution. In the wake of the Comrade Delta scandal, perhaps the most notable thing about the ‘Rebel’s Guide’ series is the attention paid to ‘The Woman Question’. Four of the six in the range have female authors and half are about famous women or women’s issues. Whether there really was any truth behind the allegations or no, there is nothing like putting up a smoke screen.

Kaz.

Leninism v Anarchism (2012)

Book Review from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anarchism. A Marxist Criticism. by John Molyneux. Bookmarks. £4.

John Molyneux is the SWPer who wrote their 1987 pamphlet on The Future Socialist Society in which he stated that the first thing that would happen on the establishment of such a society would be that wages would be increased and also that engineers would be forced, if they refused to co-operate, to work with a gun at their head. Obviously, he was talking about a future state capitalist society.

His earlier pamphlet is still listed as ‘further reading’ in his new, 80-page booklet in which he criticises anarchists from an SWP viewpoint. His basic argument is that ‘through its rejection of parties in general and the Leninist party in particular anarchism merely contributes to the organisational and political disarmament of the working class’ (p. 29).

We can agree with his criticism of anarchists for their refusal to participate in elections and for their theory that it is the existence of the state rather than of capitalism that is the cause of working-class problems. But that’s about it. On the other hand, we can agree with the anarchist emphasis on the need to establish a stateless society and with their criticism of Leninism as the theory and practice of a would-be new ruling class.

Having said this – and Molyneux notes this too – some anarchists are themselves in effect vanguardists in that they seek as an ‘active minority’ to lead the working class in an assault on capitalism and the state. Molyneux appeals to such anarchists to be consistent and join a properly-structured leadership organisation.

Our appeal is to those anarchists who are committed to the concept of a self-organised majority revolution without leaders to be consistent and abandon their dogmatic opposition to the working class forming a political party to contest elections and eventually win control of political power, not to form a government but to immediately abolish capitalism and usher in the classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society that real socialism will be.

Adam Buick

The Socialist Workers Party and Trotwatch (1994)

Book Review from the February 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why You Should Join the Socialists. By Paul Foot. Bookmarks. £1.00

Carry on Recruiting! Why the SWP dumped the "downturn" in a "dash for growth". by Trotwatch, AK Distribution, 22 Lutton Place, Edinburgh £2.95.

Whatever else can be said about Paul Foot, he's a good writer. The trouble is that he employs his talent in a bad cause: writing books to recruit people for the SWP, an undemocratic Leninist outfit which goes in for manipulative politics.

The SWP sees the mass of workers as just that - as a mass, capable only of being passive followers. On this analysis, politics becomes a struggle for "the leadership of the working class", between their present leaders - Labour MPs and councillors and trade union bureaucrats - and their would-be leaders, the SWP.

The strategy of the SWP is to discredit the Labour and trade union leaders so that the workers will desert them and follow instead the leaders of the SWP. The tactic is to call on the Labour leaders to "fight" on some issues of concern to workers and, when they don't, to denounce them as weak or bad leaders or as traitors and sell-outs.

All this presupposes that workers do follow the Labour leaders; if they don't, the SWP strategy doesn't make sense. So, at the same time as it denounces the Labour leaders as weaklings and traitors, the SWP calls on workers to follow the, and in fact actively carry out pro-Labour propaganda by blaming the problems of capitalism not on capitalism but on the Tories. In effect, the SWP's position is "follow the Labour leaders until you're ready to follow us".

Paul Foot's book reflects this approach though, to be fair, genuine socialists will find little to quarrel with in the first two chapters: "A World in Chaos" and "The Robbers and the Robbed". In fact, the first in particular is a powerful criticism of capitalism. The tragedy is that, to the extent that Foot's book does attract people who want to get rid of capitalism, it will divert them into the dead-end of Leninist politics.

Foot calls on people to join the SWP but he doesn't tell them what they will find if they do. For this, anyone impressed by his prose should get hold of the Trotwatch pamphlet. This is mainly devoted to describing the SWP's manipulative politics in relation to the anti-Poll Tax campaign and the protest against the recent (now largely achieved) pit closure programme.

However the final chapter "What's Wrong with the SWP" documents the undemocratic internal structure of the organization, where a self-perpetuating leadership dominates with the ordinary members playing the passive role of followers:

The party's line is handed down through the pages of the party's press from the Central Committee via the editors of the different journals. The branch cadre organise and deploy the new troops and orchestrate their activity. The bulk of the work involves simply selling the party's journals . . . A Leninist party simply reproduces and institutionalises existing capitalist power relations inside a supposedly 'revolutionary' organisation: between leaders and led, order givers and order takers; between specialists and acquiescent and largely powerless party workers.

Adam Buick

Non-reformist reformist (1996)

Book Review from the December 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Economics of the Madhouse by Chris Harman (Bookmarks, £3.50).

This is a well-rounded and generally well-written criticism of the modern capitalist economy and the economists who are paid to defend it. It deals with exploitation, economic crises, globalisation and many other issues of interest in a manner socialists are likely to generally agree with. As might be expected from the leading economic theoretician of the SWP, there are the usual nods in the direction of the Permanent Arms Economy as an explanation for the post-war boom and towards the allegedly socialist nature of the Russian Bolshevik coup d'etat, but these are only fleeting references and therefore only appear as minor irritants.

Harman's criticism of contemporary reformism echoes much of ours, in particular his claim that today's Labour Party does not offer unlimited beneficent reforms of the system so much as "reformism without reforms". Above all, Harman makes plain that far from the Labour Party having changed the market economy, it is the market economy that has changed Labour. Now Labour doesn't even pretend to be the party of the working class and offers little if anything distinct from the Conservatives.

Given Harman's eloquent description of the failure of capitalism across the planet, readers could be forgiven for thinking he is an advocate of common ownership and production solely for use as the solution to the problems created by the market. Far from it, Harman is actually more graphic than most SWP'ers in his claim that the answer to the "economics of the madhouse" is, er . . .  more economics of the madhouse. Viz:

"The day after the socialist revolution, as the day before, the great mass of people would go to work in factories and offices, and would be paid in money for what they did . . . It will in fact take many decades for people to learn to control consciously very many of the mass of productive processes that take place in a modern society, and in the interim they will have little choice but to put up with the old market mechanisms" (pp.103-4).

This serves to blow Harman's criticisms of the Labour reformists out of the water because the SWP is here shown to be reconciled to the insanity of the market just as much as they are. The explanation offered for this—that the working class would not know how to operate and organise production without the capitalist class and their system to guide them—is simply bizarre, un-Marxist nonsense. The working class already operates capitalism from top to bottom and long ago, as Engels pointed out, capitalism reduced the bulk of the owning class to the status of economic parasites, tearing off their share coupons and gambling on the stock exchange without taking any real part in the processes of production and distribution. If Harman claims that the introduction of production for use must be held back for "decades" because of the inability of the mass of the population to operate society, he is duty bound to tell us which functions the capitalists are able to perform that the rest of us can't. He is duty bound to, but, given the SWP's reticence to debate with socialists and their evident confusion on this topic, we somehow imagine that he wont.

DAP