Sting in the Tail: The restrictive society (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The restrictive society

Capitalism is a divisive society that not only puts worker against capitalist in a fierce class struggle. It also drives worker against worker in competition for work and wages.

A recent example of this is illustrated in the Independent (24 December) under the headline “Bring back pass laws, says black South Africans”. This report dealt with the influx of illegal immigrants to South Africa from Zaire, Mozambique and other African countries.

"Pass laws may make a comeback in Nelson Mandela's new democratic South Africa. Many black people who were victimised by them under apartheid in the past are now looking with favour on controls for immigrants. "

What a miserable society capitalism is. In the last two months of 1994 the South African government had deported 50,000 workers back to Mozambique. The same sorry story applies to Mexican workers deported from the USA. Capitalism is a world-wide system of exploitation and restriction.

Only inside a socialist system of society will men and women be free to roam the world as they desire.

Shared fantasy

First, the Fantasy Football league and now the Fantasy Share League, a creation of BBC2's Working Lunch programme. Players are invited to compete with the City of London's professionals in forecasting how shares will perform and to back their judgment by pretending to buy and sell them.

But what chance can the amateur forecasters have against the professionals? One clue was provided by Mick Clarke, Stock Market Correspondent of the Times, who confessed on Working Lunch that he had been plugging Asil Nadir’s Polly Peck company prior to its collapse.

And an article in the Guardian (27 December) reviewed how the experts had fared in 1994:

“Most of the City’s leading ‘gurus’ are probably wishing they could have eaten their words — especially those issued with great confidence this time last year. ”

When it comes to predicting how any market will perform, the only real difference between professionals and amateurs is that the former get paid for doing it while the latter do it for nothing.

Muddle-headed Ken

Ken Coates, Labour MEP, is upset over Tony Blair’s plans to change Clause Four of the Labour Party’s constitution. You can tell this from his comments on Blair and the Party “modernisers’’ whom he described as:

“bastards and shits who are going to walk past the unemployed” (Guardian, 14 January)

Does Coates really think that Clause Four, which he says “I cannot live without”, ever made a scrap of difference to unemployment under Labour governments? The fact is that every time Labour left office unemployment was higher than when it came in.

But Coates also asked an interesting question:

“How can you talk about equality and assume the permanent continuation of employers and employees?"

If he is being serious here then what is he doing in a party which, despite the presence of Clause Four, has always endorsed the production from profit system of which the employer/employee relationship is such an integral part?

Trial by torture

Kilroy on BBC1 isn’t one of Scorpion’s favourite TV programmes but the edition on 20 January was riveting stuff.

Two Tories were stuck with the task of defending the government against an angry bunch of OAP’s who complained over and over about their poverty. The luckless pair were Barbara, a County Councillor, and Daniel, a would-be Tory' MP.

And how they floundered as they tried to deal with the pensioners' flood of accusations: Barbara couldn’t even bring herself to say the word “poverty”, preferring instead “lower living standards”, while Daniel could only answer the demand for higher pensions by bleating “Where's the money to come from?” and insisting that “People should save more for their old age.”

It was a joy to see how those Tory' apologists were made to squirm by the pensioners, but the dogged way in which they defended the indefensible must have earned them the admiration of every watching politician.

Alive and kicking

Are trade unions finished? Vicious antiunion laws, large-scale unemployment plus the growth of part-time work have planted the idea among many workers that TUs can no longer produce results. These changed circumstances do mean that unions are not so effective as they once were in some activities, but they are increasingly effective in others.

For example, figures published by the TUC show that the unions won £335 million in 1993/4 in compensation for members who suffered injury or ill-health at work or were unfairly dismissed. This figure represents an eight percent increase over the previous year and is in spite of falling membership.

Socialists are the first to point to the limitation of trade unions, but their value to workers in the industrial struggle remains and should not be underestimated.

Pseudo-revolutionaries corner

In the olden days when the Communist Party used to exist they used to justify every change of “tactics" by reference to “dialectics, comrade, dialectics”. Now their mantle has fallen on the SWP whose leader Tony Cliff spouts the same gobbledegook Here he is writing about the “third stage”of the industrial struggle:

"Now we come to a problem. The level of generalisation is on the one hand quite low, but at the same time it is quite high. This sounds like a contradiction, but the contradiction is reality. ”

Eh?

Scorpion

Does the SWP have an answer to racism? (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The number of recorded racial attacks, arsons and killings has risen dramatically over the last five years as the economic recession has deepened. Is violent confrontation the answer?

The week after the Unity march was held in October to protest against racism and the BNP, the SWP organised a meeting at the LSE entitled "Why the police protect the Nazis". The speaker was the leading SWP member, Tony Cliff. Anyone attending this meeting to hear anything about why the police protect the Nazis, assuming as the title did that this was the case, would, though, have been very disappointed. The speaker, stupidly or dishonestly, thought that it was enough of an argument to shout to the audience (1) that most police are Nazis and (2) that the police had the constitutional job of supervising the Unity march, so therefore (3) the reason why the police prevented SWP members from burning down the BNP Head Office was that the police were Nazis.

This is what logicians describe as assuming what you are trying to prove. Cliff’s argument was about as strong in its structure as the argument that God is all powerful because created the Universe. Had he been putting this argument about the police being Nazis to an audience on Any Questions or Question Time or on an outdoor platform at Speakers’ Corner, he would have been quite rightly refuted and ridiculed by any cross section of workers.

As it was, Cliff’s audience, many of whom had attended the march, seemed content to wholeheartedly agree with Cliffs rousing oratory. One irony here is that after the contentious report (commissioned by the government from the tobacco magnate Patrick Sheehy) to run the police like a business, many police officers have been wooed by the stringent law and order promises of Tony Blair. Labour’s hopeful Shadow Home Secretary; the result is that come the next general election many coppers will be voting for the same party as the members of the SWP: the Labour Party. It is a point of historical record that at general elections, after lambasting the Labour Party and all its necessary shortcomings, the SWP asks its members to vote for Labour candidates as the election of another Labour government will give workers “an inch more space to manoeuvre" than under the Conservatives.

The Unity march had been organised in the wake of growing racism in Britain and across Europe. The number of recorded racial attacks, arsons and killings has risen dramatically over the last five years as the economic recession has deepened. Workers become desperate and often, ignorantly. look for easily identifiable scapegoats. Racism is thus adopted by them and exploited by those brighter, ruthless politicians who see votes and power in it. The real problem in Tower Hamlets in East London, where Derek Beackon was recently elected as a BNP councillor, is a housing problem.

Respectable racism

It is very important to look at how racism moves from being the nasty neurosis of a few frustrated fanatics and thugs to an idea which thousands of people begin to vote for. The problem in Tower Hamlets is not so much the few skinheads who sell the BNP literature on a Saturday morning — although the threat they pose to local ethnic minorities causes a lot of fear and misery — it is the thousand people with "respectable" appearances who voted BNP in the election and the tens of thousands in Britain who could soon be doing the same thing.

What did the SWP say about this problem at the meeting? What educational and argumentative ammunition did it provide for the eager young radicals who attended to learn about how to persuade fellow workers against racism? The SWP speaker said nothing about such arguments. Absolutely nothing. Instead the 30-minute talk was devoted entirely to repealing the mantra about the police all being Nazis, and to looking at half a dozen ways of using physical force against fascists. His tirade included all the vocabulary of "barricade storming" and the need to use guns against fascist thugs who have knives. Cliff’s argument was befitting of any angry young child who had not yet understood the rôle of ideas in politics.

Fascism personified

He saw fascism as an almost physical entity, a concrete part of society, personified in the small number of identifiable members or officers of the BNP. These people had to be "taken out" (physically deterred from being fascists, by being beaten up or, presumably, killed) and then the problem would be solved. You have to surgically remove the "bad apples". In one of many moments of flamboyant rhetoric he said:

"I'll tell you this. If you have a barrel of good apples but there is in the middle of the good apples one bad apple, the good apples will not make the bad apple good."

What followed from this simplistic and strikingly inappropriate metaphor, is that if the "bad apple" of fascism currently sitting in the middle of society could somehow be surgically removed, then all the good apples would be preserved Although Cliff’s language was riddled with references to force being used against the Nazis, he nowhere articulated with any precision how far his young acolytes should go in the furtherance of their aim to "remove the bad apple". Are the fascists to be simply threatened with baseball bats to relinquish their bigotries; are they to be rounded up and locked away to rot in some secret SWP political prison camps for workers with "the wrong attitude"; or was Cliff recommending that, ultimately, these political incorrigibles should he assassinated?

This meeting, like other SWP meetings I have attended, was rigged. It could not be described as an open, honest meeting designed as a genuine forum for workers to discuss the ideas put by the speaker. The rigging works in this way. The speaker addresses the meeting for half an hour. The chairperson then invites people from the floor for any questions to the speaker or points they wish to raise. Some of these questions, as you might imagine, raise points which are very awkward for the SWP. pointing to inconsistencies in its propaganda, undemocratic features of its organisation or clearly anti-working-class conduct it urges upon its followers. Rather than require the speaker to answer each point from the floor once it has been made (and thus allowing the questioner to come back if they are not satisfied with the speaker's response), the chairperson simply takes all the questions from the floor in sequence without any response from the speaker. When the chairperson thinks enough questions and points have been raised, he or she then invites the speaker to respond to the points collectively. This sinister technique thus permits the speaker to pass over any really troublesome points, damning them with feint response. Such meetings, in the best traditions of authoritarian, deceptive showpieces, give the appearance of being open because questions from the floor are allowed but in reality the questions that the SWP would prefer not to be asked of them in public are deftly avoided by their speakers.

That was exactly what Tony Cliff did at this meeting. One of the first questioners was a young man who identified himself as having been a long-time resident of London’s East End. He said that he could not really see any substantial difference between what Cliff had urged anti fascists to do (i.e., beat up fascists) and what the fascists were doing (beating up anti-fascists and people from ethnic minorities). If what the SWP objected to in fascism was it reliance on force to further its ideas, its bullying, threatening tactics, then surely it was wrong to employ exactly those tactics in opposing the rise of fascism? A few SWP members coughed and shuffled about at this point but Cliff was saved from having to enter into any serious debate with this man because the chairperson moved immediately to the next questioner. When the time did come for Cliff to respond to the six or seven points put to him. he dealt contemptuously with the point from the East Ender. The answer, in a few seconds before hopping on to a more friendly question with a much practised agility, was simply that the force of the anti-fascists was historically justified because (a) the other side started it and (b) the force the the fascists had used before (in the Second World War) and were planning to use again was of such a high order that it would be foolish to try and respond in the realm of ideas.

We were back to the principles of gangsterism. The talk of Robert de Niro playing Al Capone in The Untouchables. "If someone comes for me with fists, I answer with a knife. If he comes with a knife I answer with a gun . . ." Many people in areas like Tower Hamlets are living in desperate poverty. There is a housing crisis. Some people from ethnic minorities do have housing and so ignorant workers are left prey to the idea that if these "immigrants" were ail shipped away then there would be plenty of houses and jobs for "British" workers. What is the best way to argue against this sort of politics? Don’t ask Tony Cliff, he doesn’t seem to know or care. At least if he has any thoughts on these matters he was not disposed to share them with anyone at the SWP meeting. Cliff had other things on his mind and sounded more like Lennox Lewis’s coach than a political thinker.

Burn it down

One of the questions was from a young man from Northern Ireland. He spoke as a member of the SWP and was very keen that the meeting should focus closely on exactly why the SWP activists on the march had been prevented from turning down Upper Wickham Lane in Welling, towards the BNP headquarters "to burn it down". There was momentary unease from some at the meeting whereupon the questioner decided to be more up front: "I mean we might as well be clear about what we w'ere trying to do". He went on to fulminate against the police and how despicably pro-Nazi their conduct was in not permitting reasonable activists like himself to go about their proper civic business with cans of petrol and flame throwers. Clearly, the state was in cahoots with the BNP. Quite who the SWP would turn to for assistance if the BNP threatened to bum down its premises is open to question.

The interesting thing about the contribution of the young frustrated arsonist was that no one sought to dissent from the aim of the march that he avowed. Tony Cliff did not say, for example, in summing up. that the SWP had not formulated any such plan. The chairperson did not publicly proclaim that the questioner was, in fact, speaking for himself alone when ranting on about the need to burn things down. The young firebrand turned out to be the kid who yelled that the Emperor had no clothes on: the naive exposer of truth.

Workers from different cultures and ethnic groups have more in common that that which distinguishes them. They are all living in relative poverty and insecurity while they are systematically robbed by the owners of the means of producing wealth (owners who come from all sorts of racial groups). Racism has not tended to develop in times of economic boom; it flourishes when the going gets particularly tough for workers. With nationalist rhetoric of mainstream politicians, racist ideas being toyed with by Labour and Liberal local councillors, and a land where, for instance, the Minister for Education advocates that the Union Jack be unfurled from every school roof in the land, vicious racism is only one goose-step away.

The arguments against racism must be put on radio phone-in programmes, in local and national newspaper letters columns, in public debates, pubs and and during doorstep canvassing. But the only effective arguments against this ugly and recurrent feature of capitalism are those which are truly socialist. Not those quasi socialist SWP banalities which end with an embarrassed instruction "vote Labour with no illusions" at the next general election. It was a Labour government in 1962 which promulgated Britain’s first piece of explicitly racist legislation. Racism is born from the poverty and nationalistic tensions of capitalism; there is no such thing as a successful campaign against racism within capitalism. That this is so is testified to by the reemergence of racism with all its terrors after it had risen and then fallen in the 1970s. The Anti-Nazi League rather unbelievably claim that racism failed in the 1970s because it was stymied by the might of university students with yellow badges chanting to Clash songs in parks. The truth is that most National Front supporters or potential voters were absorbed into the Conservative Party, specially after Mrs Thatcher assured them all in a speech in 1979 that (a) she would not tolerate our culture being "swamped" by foreigners and (b) that unlike the relatively small and shabby NF, she had the power and real prospect of putting her prejudices into action.

The growth of racism will not be broken with brute force, only bones and hope will become fractured in such a fight. In open public debate, the ignorance and bigotry behind the arguments of racism can be easily exposed, at which point support disperses more quickly than the queue at the door of the surgeon who is exposed as an unqualified impostor with a penchant for learn-as-you-go quackery.

Gary Jay

Blogger's Note:

". . . It was a Labour government in 1962 which promulgated Britain’s first piece of explicitly racist legislation."

I looked for a correction in a later issue of the Socialist Standard, but I couldn't see one. The Labour Party wasn't in government in 1962. The legislation referred to from 1962 was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act which was a piece of legislation which ". . . entailed stringent restrictions on the entry of Commonwealth citizens into the United Kingdom."  The Labour Party in opposition, led by Hugh Gaitskell, opposed the 1962 Act.

What legislation Gary Jay was perhaps thinking of was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968, which was a piece of legislation passed under Wilson's Labour Government. This was denounced in the pages of the Socialist Standard at the time as piece of racist legislation:

• April 1968: Labour's New Race Law by Adam Buick
• April 1968: 'Prejudice and Pride' by Ivan

Letter: Why all this disagreement? (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I read Allan Goldsmith’s report of the SWP public meeting in Chelmsford (October Socialist Standard).

In spite of years of becoming hardened to the senseless divisions among professing socialists, I am still capable of descending into a gloom of disappointment bordering on despair whenever yet another manifestation of what is the greatest strength of the capitalists is arraigned for all the world to see.

The capitalists, whose ethos is competition and conflict, display solidarity in defence of their system to the point of recruiting the working class to their cause to fight their battles for them. Professing socialists, whose ethos is co-operation and interdependence, make a virtue out of division by inflating tactical issues in displays of doctrinal infallibility.

In my article which I was privileged to have printed in the July Socialist Standard, I said:

'The achievement of socialism is the responsibility of all who take up the cause irrespective of which organisation, if any, they identify with. Socialism is no longer a luxury which can occupy our intellects in interminable arguments about strategies for achieving it to the exclusion of events unfolding around us. Socialism has become an urgent necessity. To hand over the world’s economy to the business elites to exploit for profit, by collusion or default, is a recipe for social and environmental disaster. If socialism is denied for lack of the will to unite, it will amount to a criminal act of betrayal of the working class.”

I said it to your readers and I would say the same to Tony Cliff and have often done so to SWP members.

Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that the working class came to "want and understand socialism". Can anyone really believe that the ensuing transformation could proceed with total unanimity where no differences would arise to be tested by discussion and debate, without controversy, without strongly held conflicting opinions to be resolved? Of course not. Would that be that, then? Would we say that we could not agree amongst ourselves and hand it all back? Of course not. We would have to display the will to overcome differences or disintegrate.

Human beings are not endowed with flawless strains of reason, logic and wisdom at birth. These qualities have to be learned by every generation by interaction. Doctrines of certainty produce only paralysis of thought and irrational acts by people anchored in their own obstinacy. The matter is not one of being "right” or "wrong” or of keeping faith with whatever flag you have nailed to the mast. No one is discredited by testing their beliefs or ideas and being ready to modify them by persuasion. My own belief in socialism has often been tested by a challenge to others to "talk me out of it”, and I have not yet been on the losing end of an argument with the capitalists nor ever expect to. But in engaging capitalists and professing socialists alike, there is much in the detail which advances my understanding and reinforces me in the view that with a will to achieving socialist unity, it can be done.

Subordinate issues should not overshadow the super-ordinate goal of realising socialist society. Whether Tony Cliff "tells the workers to vote Labour to beat the Tories" is irrelevant to them. They do it or not, anyway. What the "workers" find implausible is this advice being given by a party which uses as much newsprint condemning Labour's capitalism as it does attacking the Tories, yet makes no effort to present an alternative manifesto to the people by which they can register their support for socialism. As I have often been told in discussion with SWP members, it has more to do with the practical problem of installing large numbers of candidates and draining their funds and placing their capacity to publish and campaign at risk than any outright rejection of entering the electoral arena. I agree with Cliff that a socialist society is something that will not be realised until "many years in the future".

I also agree that "the Tories are the enemy” but so do the Liberal Democrats. So do we all. It is more important what defeats the Tories. Winning an election against the Conservative Party has never ushered in socialism. All the achievements of previous Labour governments this century have been either partially or wholly destroyed by Thatcher or Major. If Blair wins the next election, it will be on the basis of “giving the other lot a go" and not because the British people have changed their minds about capitalism. It will not even be a Scandinavian-style commitment to redistribution through the taxation system. The Tory Party, the "enemy", will be out of office but their ideas will prevail because their ideas will not have been defeated, only their personnel.

The defeat of capitalism can only come about by a commitment to socialism by the people. I am all for "teach, teach, teach” and Cliff shot himself in the foot by his disparaging remarks about the Socialist Party. But unless our message is presented widely and confidently by a united movement of socialists who are prepared to demonstrate the will and the maturity to rise above subordinate matters which can be discussed and debated, and focus their eyes on the super- ordinate goal of defeating capitalism, Tony Cliff will wait forever to have "socialism here and now”.

Professing socialists perpetuating a culture of competition amongst themselves contradict everything they claim to stand for by doing so. If professing socialists cannot achieve unity amongst themselves, why should anybody believe that a socialist society will be anything other than a chaotic shambles doomed to disintegration?

Peter Nielsen, 

Worcester

Reply:

Our differences with at least the leaders of the SWP are rather more than tactical. They see themselves as leaders, as the General Staff of the Revolution, and advocate a party organised on non-democratic lines, whereas we regard following leaders as disastrous and insist that the movement for socialism must, as a matter of principle, be thoroughly democratic both in its internal organisation and in the methods it employs. Socialism is a democratic society. Quite a different proposition from rule by a vanguard party.

Editors.

Soviet Capitalism: Bonds (1967)

From the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

State bonds are a feature of capitalism which the Bolsheviks inherited from the Tsarist regime. A few details show to what an extent the Imperial government relied on this method for obtaining revenue. For example, in just five years (between 1909-1913) 4,100 million roubles were raised by issuing these stocks and, during the same period, 4,040 million roubles were needed for interest and redemption payments on loans which had been floated previously. When the Bolsheviks seized power they took advantage of the change in government and refused to recognise the pre-revolutionary foreign and internal loans. This was a logical step because by then many of the rich bond-holders were living abroad, exiled enemies of Russian state capitalism.

As soon as the chaotic conditions of the Civil War started to settle, the Bolsheviks set about floating new loans. Thus, between 1922-25 bonds were issued which brought 396 million roubles into the state budget — this being 7.5 per cent of all government revenue. This was followed, in the years of forced industrialisation under Stalin, by a succession of state loans. The bonds carried interest rates which the wealthy found it difficult to resist and Russia was dubbed, by the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain, the “land of high profits”.

By the time of the Third Five-Year Plan, the capital being invested in the loans was dwarfing the figures of Tsarist days. Thus, between 1938-41, four state loans were floated, bringing in a total of about 3,400 million roubles. In the war years revenue from the sale of state bonds was as follows:

Investment came from three principal sources. First, there were the state industries — the banks, insurance companies and so on —which made use of their vast reserves. Thus, figures in the government budgets for 1941-44 show that more than 580 million roubles were obtained from the insurance business, a large percentage in the form of subscriptions to state loans. Secondly, individuals from the ruling class were eager to sink their capital in state bonds, which guaranteed a steady return in interest payments. As a random example, we can mention Vladimir Stefanov — a priest of the Moscow Church of the Assumption — who, recognising that war is good business, invested 73,000 roubles in the Defence Fund during World War II. That this was no exceptional case was made clear by R. Bishop in his pamphlet Soviet Millionaires, issued by the Russia Today Society in 1943. He presented figures which showed that in one state of the USSR alone (Kazakstan) at least eighteen individuals had invested a million roubles or more. Bishop attempted to justify this with the incredibly weak comment that “in the Soviet Union the millionaire has acquired his roubles by his own toil and by service to the Soviet State and people.” A few years later T. Cliff was very neatly to smash that lame argument, as follows.

If we examine this statement we find that, as late as 1940, the average annual income of workers and employees being only 4.000 roubles, to collect a million roubles would have taken an average worker 250 years — provided he spent no money on himself at all. The Soviet millionaire gets, in interest alone, 50,000 roubles for every million, which is many times more than the income of any worker. (Russia: A Marxist Analysis—T. Cliff).

The third source was from the working class. There were mass-subscription loans, described as “semi-voluntary” — which meant that workers “bought” their bonds by means of compulsory stoppages from their wages. In the factories and offices, it was the branches of the state-controlled trade unions which were responsible for seeing that their members contributed. These loans were organised on a lottery basis — something like British premium bonds — and the prizes represented at first 4 per cent then 3 per cent and finally 2 per cent of the total sum subscribed. This compared unfavourably with the interest-bearing loans which at times carried rates of up to 11 per cent.

In the decade following the Second World War the issue of bonds went on unabated. During the Fourth Five-Year Plan the state loans brought in almost 11,700 million roubles and the comparable figure for the Fifth Five-Year Plan was 13,600 million roubles. As Khrushchev explained, at several public meetings in early 1957, the state debt had reached 26,000 million roubles, while interest and redemption payments were in the region of 2,900 million roubles annually. This situation led to a drastic reversal of government policy. The central committee of the Communist Party decided to discontinue, from 1958 onwards, the floating of further compulsory loans aimed at the working class. At the same time it suspended lottery-prize drawings on the already existing, mass-subscription bonds and, in addition,, repayment on these was postponed for a period of twenty years or more. It should be emphasized, however, that the sale of bonds to wealthy individuals on a voluntary basis was not discontinued; neither were the interest payments on these stocks defaulted on. (See The Soviet Economy— A. Nove. 1965. p. 107).

The latest figures available show that the issue of state bonds is still running at well over a thousand million roubles each year.

Investment today comes mainly from the banks — as before — and also from members of the ruling class, who can die with the comfortable assurance that their bonds are free from inheritance tax. On the other hand, the individual Russian worker, like wage-earners everywhere, is not in a position to invest. His wages are barely sufficient to keep him in working order from week to week, and from generation to generation. The most he can aspire to is buying a few premium bonds and then hoping against hope that he will land one of the big prizes. It is his function to produce the surplus value from which interest is derived, not to share its distribution.

It was Professor Allakhverdyan of the Moscow Financial Institute who was responsible for the pathetic remark that “the loans floated by socialist states express the new economic relationships . . " Any thinking worker can see that the very fact that interest-bearing bonds exist in Soviet Russia is plain evidence of capitalism in that country. They are one of the mechanisms by which the ruling class gets its hands on the surplus value extracted from working men and women.

John Crump

Russian State Capitalism (1964)

Book Review from the September 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia: A Marxist Analysis by Tony Cliff (International Socialism, 18/-)

The problem of Russia was a much more immediate one for the Trotskyists than it was for other groups. It is for this reason that so much of the research into the nature of the social order in Russia has come from this source. It would be foolish to pretend that we can learn nothing from their works and particularly foolish to pretend that nothing can be learned from Tony Cliff’s Russia: A Marxist Analysis. Cliff is the leading exponent of one of the Trotskyist state capitalist theories.

As a follower of Trotsky, he holds that the Russian revolution was the first stage of a world socialist revolution. The failure of this revolution to spread left the Russian “Workers’ State” isolated. In these circumstances, asks Cliff, what social order could appear in Russia? Socialism was out of the question and the backwardness of the country had already led to the appearance of a bureaucratic clique above the workers. Capitalism had to develop there. This did not take the form, as might have been expected, of a bourgeois restoration. Instead the bureaucracy transformed itself into a class when it began the process of rapid capital accumulation in 1928. In doing this it was carrying out the traditional function of the bourgeoisie.

The historic mission of the Stalinist bureaucracy became the establishment of capitalism in Russia. This it did with a ruthlessness previously unparalleled. Primitive capital accumulation in Britain, as described by Marx, was bloody enough. In Russia—with its slave camps, political terror and “dekulakisation” which drove the peasants into the factories—it was worse. The first part of Cliff’s book analyses this process in detail. The name Cliff chooses for Stalin’s regime is Bureaucratic State Capitalism. This describes a situation where a bureaucracy in control of the state machine fulfils the function of the bourgeoisie in capitalist relations of production.

In the second part of the book Cliff shows how Bureaucratic State Capitalism—with its irrational price system and other contradictions—has become a positive hindrance to the further development of the productive forces in Russia. The Stalinist bureaucracy has now fulfilled its purpose and is superfluous. Khrushchev’s reforms can’t disguise this fact. What of the future? Cliff maintains that there can be no return from a state-directed economy to a market economy and that therefore the overthrow of the bureaucracy can only lead to Socialism. As proof of this he instances the Hungarian Revolution.

We agree with Cliff’s description of Stalin’s Russia as Bureaucratic State Capitalism though not with his analysis of how and why it came about. Nor can we accept what Cliff suggests is going to happen. To talk of a “return” to a Western style market economy is nonsense for such a system has never existed in Russia. Bureaucratic State Capitalism is a stage in the development of Capitalism in Russia. This stage is now coming to an end and a market economy similar in some respects to that in the West is appearing. Cliff ignores the example of Yugoslavia; he also makes no reference to the proposals of Prof. Liberman and Academician Nemichinov for a relaxation of controls and a more rational and flexible price system. Of course, this evolution away from a bureaucratically-directed economy need not be automatic; Russia is a leading military power with a huge defence budget. A worsening of the international situation, as Cliff points out, could lead to a tightening of bureaucratic control over the economy.

One point that is brought out by Cliff is that the form of appropriation of surplus value under bureaucratic State Capitalism is different from that of the capitalism analysed by Marx. The ruling bureaucracy in Russia only exercises a de facto class monopoly over the means of production. Thus their share appears only to a small extent in the forms of rent, interest and profit: they get it in other ways, particularly as bloated salaries, pensions and prizes. As Cliff points out, towards the end of feudalism the ruling ideology condemned interest and profit, by which they meant only rent. So in Russia where the ruling ideology condemns unearned income, the surplus value is camouflaged as “earned income”. This is important as it brings out a difference between capitalism in Russia and the capitalism we know in the West.

Who are the recipients of this share out? Do they form a class? Cliff maintains that they do because they carry out the functions of a capitalist class. This seems fair enough. The bureaucracy is made up of the top political, military and industrial managers. This is not a homogeneous social group and there is room for conflict. Under the bureaucratically-directed economy of Stalin’s era the managers of the industrial enterprises were subject to the control of the political bureaucrats; now that Russia is moving; away from a bureaucratically-directed economy, the managers are gaining more freedom. Any move in this direction is bound to strengthen their hands again-the party bureaucrats. The managers appear to be the emerging dominant group in Russia. The completion of this process should put an end once and for all to the myth that Russia is Socialist.

Russia has set a pattern of capitalist development for backward and peasant countries; and Bolshevism is the theoretical aspect of this. This explains its attraction in the less developed parts of world. In this pattern the historic mission of the capitalist class is performed by an industrialising elite. In Russia these were the leaders of a revolutionary party; elsewhere they are young military officers, revolutionary intellectuals and nationalist political leaders. The very fact that such regimes are called state capitalist implies an enhanced role for political leaders and state officials. The evolution of capitalism in these countries may thus be different from the pattern described by Marx in Capital. There is a crying need for a detailed Marxist analysis of this new pattern. Cliff’s book on Bureaucratic State Capitalism in Russia is a contribution to this. It should be essential reading for all Socialists.

Adam Buick

Productivity deals (1970)

Book Review from the June 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Employers’ Offensive: Productivity Deals and How to Fight Them, by T. Cliff, Pluto Press. 6s.

In the preface to his new book on productivity deals Tony Cliff tells us that it is intended as a handbook to enable shop stewards to understand and resist offers of productivity deals. He regards such offers as “part of a major offensive by the employing class of this country to shift the balance of forces in industry permanently in their direction”.

This book is a continuation of Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards which T. Cliff and C. Barker wrote in 1966. The review of that book in the Socialist Standard (August 1966) ridiculed its claim that out of the shop stewards there would come a new “revolutionary working class movement”. Cliff now admits that we were right and he was wrong — “Life” he says “proved much more complex than the theory put forward”. Specifically he admits that incomes policy did not stop the rise of all wages, it did not provoke general working class resistance “economic, ideological and political”, and there did not arise “a new workers’ movement… overcoming the fragmentation of the working class”.

Nothing daunted, he is having another go. What Incomes Policy failed to achieve he now expects to be achieved by the employers’ campaign for productivity deals. Events will prove him wrong again.

His argument this time is that because of the big increase in the size of investment required for modern industry, the rapidity of technological change and the intensity of foreign competition, capitalism needs to plan years ahead and have long-term control of costs, including wages. The problem is alleged to be particularly great for British capitalism because inflation and the adverse balance of payments lead to “stop-go” and a slower rate of expansion, which in turn raises the cost of production per unit of the products. So the capitalist must have productivity deals which undermine the workers’ shop floor organisation, the shop stewards. This will be resisted with the help of Cliff’s handbook and the new revolutionary movement will emerge.

It will be seen that fate has been very unkind to the author; for about the time his book was being printed the adverse balance of payments was converted into a surplus; also inflation is going on in most other countries too; and productivity deals are going ahead often with the approval of the shop stewards.

One of the author’s errors is to underestimate the resilience of capitalism and the resourcefulness of business managements. Having seen that capitalism would rather like certain things he imagines that there are “musts”; but there is no must about it. Long term wage contracts would be useful to the capitalists but they are not indispensable, especially as employers know by experience that unions have little hesitation about presenting new claims during the life of a contract if circumstances favour this. The situation recently arose in America of the General Electric Company fighting for a one year wage contract while the unions were pressing for three years.

Again, employers would like to be able to enter into long period contracts with buyers to supply at a fixed price, but this is not a matter of life and death. The Shipbuilders and Repairers National Association reports that contracts to build ships are now being drawn up with a clause which allows for some form of price variation to meet unforeseen higher costs (Financial Times, 30 April 1970). Many other firms do the same where completion of the job extends over a long period.

What vitiates much of Cliff’s theorising is that he seems to be quite unaware of the past history of capitalism. He draws hasty conclusions from current events as if nothing very much happened before he came on the scene to observe them.

He tells us for example that in this country it was the Macmillan Government in 1962 which first embarked on an Incomes Policy. It was in fact started in 1948 by the Labour Government when it laid down the principle that there was to be no general increase of wages “unless accompanied by a substantial increase in production”. The same idea was present in the productivity campaign of 1920.

He says that ten years ago productivity bargaining was “a new and strange phenomenon to most workers in British industry”. Little is new about it except the name. The capitalists have always been intent on eliminating unoccupied time and wasted effort from the productive process and workers have always with varying degrees of success, resisted: it and tried to bargain about it. The basic attitude of the employers has always been the same as it is now, to try to get all the benefits of increased productivity themselves. Marx, in Volume I of Capital (Chapter XXI), dealing with the bitter struggles over piece work wages and the workers’ attempts to get higher rates in line with increased productivity and profits, ended the chapter with the following:

  “The capitalist . . . declares roundly that the productiveness of labour does not concern the labourer at all.”

Many of the present productivity deals are concerned with the worker giving up trade union restrictive practices for a wage increase. In the first world war workers were unwisely induced by appeals to their patriotism to give up trade union practices and accept dilution, getting in return only a pledge that after the war what had been given up would be restored. When that time came the workers were not in a position to make the pledge stick and, as Sidney Webb tersely remarked in his History of Trade Unionism “Trade unionists were on the whole ‘done'”.

Cliff has a good deal to say about Work Study (Measured Day Work) and job evaluation. Here again there is little new except that the methods have become more elaborate. Nearly half a century ago factory workers were bitterly resisting employers’ attempts to introduce the Bedaux system of unit measurement (the work expected of a worker in one minute). Job evaluation was years old when in 1955 it was formally introduced in the Civil Service. It was being used in a rough and ready way by the Post Office at the end of the nineteenth century and the Post Office long ago developed its own system of units of work to adjust the numbers of staff to the volume of traffic.

There is one superficial change concerning wage bargaining brought about by years of inflation. For a quarter of a century governments have more or less continuously run a policy of depreciating the currency, with the consequence of an abnormal rise of prices and the cost of living. They have done this as part of their belief that they were thereby securing “full employment”. A rising cost of living is politically unpopular so the governments have also strenuously sought to offset some of the rise by finding ways to increase productivity per worker (Reducing the amount of labour required to produce commodities). As in this situation employers could count on getting continuously rising prices for what they sold they were content to put up a more or less token resistance to wage increases required to keep up with the cost of living, offering their real resistance to increases beyond that level, just as when Marx wrote about it a century or more ago. Official figures for 1969 give a revealing picture of what happens.

“Wages and salaries alone rose by 7 and half per cent; but this increase was reduced to 5 and half per cent by higher personal tax payments and national insurance contributions. Most of the remaining 5 and half per cent rise in personal disposable income was offset by higher prices . . . “ (Financial Times, 9 April 1970.)

The workers would be on sound ground in resisting all attempts to intensify their work or worsen its conditions and should always try to get the highest wage possible in the circumstances of the time, the strike, or threatened strike being the one way to test the possibilities. Cliff turns this simple proposition into something needlessly complicated. He produces a handbook for conducing productivity bargaining but declares himself to be “bitterly and unalterably opposed” to such deals. Then he hedges by saying that you can’t just say no to an employers’ offer, and by directing his fire against “derisory” offers and ones which give only “a few miserable shillings”. His real reason why shop stewards cannot just say no is that many workers want such deals and if the shop stewards take a negative attitude they isolate themselves from the workers.

One of his recommendations is that shop stewards should “invent” restrictive practices the abandonment of which will be of no value to employers and then sell these to the employers for wage increases. It is open to question whether the employers’ negotiators are so easily deceived but if Cliff believes them to be that naive it is for him to justify making these tricks public. Certainly the point was taken by Peter Jay who reviewed the book in the Times (25 March 1970) for he recommends to “any business executive who expects to be engaged in negotiating productivity deals” to get a copy and “know your enemy”.

Cliff is a firm believer in leadership as against the Socialist principle that working class emancipation requires the understanding of the workers themselves. He believes however, that the “natural leaders” of the workers are the shop stewards and other “floor” representatives and not the national trade union leaders.

His case against national trade union leaders and for shop stewards is that the national leaders get out of touch with their members, but he then admits that many of the shop floor representatives also “get completely divorced from their base”. Without knowing that he is doing so he actually shows how little use his “good” leaders are for they cannot act beyond the understanding of the workers; he grants “that a trade union leader can’t be expected to march 10 miles ahead of his membership”, and, as already remarked, he admits that unless shop stewards fall in with workers’ support for productivity deals they become “isolated”.

One of his proposals for reforming the trade unions is that “union officials should get the same rate of pay as the average members”. This is a question that occupied the unions as soon as the need arose to have full-time officials and to many trade unionists. Cliff’s proposal looks a useful one. It was being propagated nearly half a century ago by an organisation of trade union office staffs. It is practicable for unions of comparatively highly paid workers and something of this kind is operated by some unions. But where the membership is of low paid workers it can be quite impracticable. For example, in the agricultural workers union, which has its head office near the centre of London, it would mean that the full-time officials would be paid considerably less than their clerks and shorthand typists because it would be quite impossible to recruit staffs in Central London at the wage of an agricultural worker.

In any event it is misdirected. What is of much more importance is that union membership should see to it that they formulate policy themselves and insist on officials and executives and shop stewards carrying it out.

Cliff’s book is dotted with references to Socialism and the abolition of capitalism but without any real understanding of what Socialism implies — on occasion he indicates that he thinks state capitalism (nationalisation) is Socialism. Emancipation is not going to be achieved by non-Socialists led by shop stewards because it requires a Socialist working class getting control of the machinery of government.

So little does he understand the futility of putting a party of capitalism in control of the machinery of government that he and his organisation (“International Socialists”) were telling the workers to support Labour candidates at the last two elections — and are doing so again at this one. His book is not going to achieve the new revolutionary working class he anticipates.

Edgar Hardcastle

Unemployment in Russia (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

If, as the Socialist Party of Great Britain maintains, Russia is broadly State Capitalist, and, as Marx held, that capitalism breeds and needs unemployment why does there appear to be no unemployment in Russia? Is it, as members of the Communist Party claim, that the Russian planning system has abolished unemployment?

It is first necessary to recognise that the term unemployed has two meanings which overlap but are not the same. It means “not working” and also “out of a job”. The difference can be seen from experience in this country. Ideally, from the capitalist point of view all workers on the pay-roll would be fully and continuously working and as soon as work is not available they would be sacked and become out of work. For several reasons this is not always practicable. Owing to weather conditions, as in agriculture and building, it is sometimes impossible to carry on work out-of-doors and impossible to organise alternative work under cover. Also there are industries or services in which it is not possible to secure an even flow of traffic or even to foresee from day to day when the peaks will arise; inevitably therefore, there are periods in which workers on the pay-roll are unoccupied.

In the early post-war years when experience justified the employers’ belief that any falling off of trade would be short-lived it was a fairly widespread practice to keep some workers on in slack periods rather than face the possibility of being short of labour when the expected early recovery came. One of the reasons unemployment has jumped so much in the past few years is that the prolonged depression has destroyed employer’s confidence that recovery will come soon and their case for “hoarding” labour has disappeared.

Some, if not all, of these factors operate in Russia as in Britain. It is known for example, on the admission of Russian authorities, that in part of the Autumn and Winter a third or more of farmers on the state and collective farms have no work to do on the farms. (See Socialist Standard November 1968). There is also in Russia as in Britain a considerable number of workers unemployed in the period between changing from one job to another. Russian sources are quoted in Russia — a Marxist Analysis by T. Cliff to the effect that 36 per cent of the workers in certain areas changed their jobs each year and that the average duration of unemployment was 31 days.

Consequently, the claim that in Russia there is no unemployment and no workers out of a job is not to be taken literally, but this leaves to be answered the more important question why the cycle of expansion of industry followed by depression and heavy unemployment now strongly evident in Britain and elsewhere seems to be absent in Russia.

When Marx wrote about 19th Century British capitalism he assumed free market conditions of production for profit, a working class able to strike over wages, and that failure to make a profit would compel the individual capitalist firm to curtail production, sack workers or go out of business. Under war-time conditions with millions of workers in the armed forces, wages and prices controlled, maximum output demanded and profit guaranteed, unemployment fell to abnormally low levels (Under 1 per cent in some years). Some of these conditions continued after the war when maximum output was in demand to make good wartime destruction and under-investment, and unemployment remained abnormally low. In Russia where war damage and loss of life were incomparably greater the unsatisfied demand for output and the shortage of labour were correspondingly greater and lasted longer than in Britain.

But the great difference between Russian and British industry is that Russian centralised control and financing of production and foreign trade has the result that the failure of a particular factory or industry to maintain efficiency and make a profit does not put it out of business — the loss is borne by the national budget.

On the side of employment and unemployment the evidence is that Russian industry is heavily overmanned.

David Bonavia in the Times (2 February 1972) reviews the situation and concludes: —

  “Russia has no unemployment problem, as such, because it is illegal for an able-bodied person not to work, unless supported by a spouse. In practice this means that the state merely accepts the losses from an economic situation which would result in huge unemployment in the West . . . From the individual’s point of view, the Soviet approach to unemployment may be preferable, because it increases his security. From the point of view of the economy as a whole, it is a heavy burden to have large numbers of people drawing their pay for working useless or even counter-productive jobs.

Russian planned agriculture and promises of abundant food supplies have not prevented Russia from having to buy millions of tons of foodstuffs abroad. Recently, in spite of planned expansion of sugar production the Russian government has had to default on an agreement to supply Finland and is a big buyer in the world market. Above all the Russian claim that they had planned control of the monetary situation has seen the rouble become a black market currency in the outside world, selling at a fraction of its nominal value.

For Russia, as a world power, needing more and more to move into world markets, the key question is whether controls and planning can achieve the levels of efficiency of rival powers. In spite of boasts of surpassing American industrial output, the gap between Russia and the USA has not been closed and in the meantime Japan with half the population is fast overtaking Russia.

Edgar Hardcastle

Who are the Marxists? (1966)

Book Review from the June 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Socialist Review, International Socialism, 18s.

This book is a collection of articles from a now defunct journal, Socialist Review. Its former followers are now grouped around another journal, International Socialism. It is one of the many trotskyist offshoots which claim to be Marxist, yet which depart radically from Marx’s basic ideas on many points.

Marx argued that only the working class can free itself from wage-slavery. By working class he understood all those who, having no property, had to sell their working abilities for a wage in order to live. Today this class, composed of managers, clerks, factory workers, labourers and so on, run society from top to bottom. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, with Marx, holds that only they, acting as a united class, can be the agent of the social change from capitalism to socialism. IS sees the agent as only a section of this class, those who work in the factories, mines, railways and docks. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that they idealise this section of the working class. Seeing that most of the members of groups like IS are not themselves workers in these sorts of jobs their attitude verges on the condescending, of doing something for the poor, down-trodden workers. This attitude is a left-over from their Leninist past. Lenin, in contradiction to Marx, held that the workers were incapable of becoming socialists by themselves; they had to be introduced to socialist ideas by an enlightened vanguard. This vanguard would lead them against capitalism.

The IS group, like similar groups, has a reform programme which they call a "transitional programme." This is a programme designed to create a socialist understanding and to be realised as a transitional stage to Socialism. When these reforms are examined, for example, nationalisation of banks, national planning, State monopoly of foreign trade, it becomes clear that IS is saying that State capitalism is a necessary stage to Socialism. More than this, in fact, many of their members including some writers in this book clearly don't understand the difference between State Capitalism and Socialism; they really believe that nationalisation is Socialism and that wages, buying and selling, money, etc., will exist in Socialism. In their day-to-day propaganda the emphasis is on State capitalism rather, than Socialism as the solution to workers’ problems. The Socialist Party of Great Britain holds that capitalism has outlived its usefulness and that Socialism is possible as soon as the workers want it; there is no need for any State capitalist stage.

Finally, there is the inevitable r-r-revolutionary romanticism, the dreaming of mass strikes and street battles (read Cliff on the Belgian General Strike of 1960). This leads IS to dismiss with contempt the historically-evolved means to freedom—the vote. But at election times we witness the spectacle of people who dismiss the vote as “a scrap of paper" and Parliament as a “gas house" eagerly working for, and urging workers to vote for, one of the major capitalist parties in this country. This devotion to the Labour Party is maintained even when, as in Hampstead at the last election, they were faced with a socialist candidate. Not understanding the significance of the vote they use it and urge others to use it, to give political power to the owning class. Are they really Marxists?

Adam Buick

The SWP: An Undemocratic, Leninist Organisation (2013)

Via Soviet Goon Boy blog.

From the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In view of the undemocratic nature of the SWP, which has recently been exposed, we reproduce below part of an education document we produced about them in 1995.

At the beginning of 1968 the IS (International Socialists) group was organised on relatively democratic lines. There were branches; there was an annual conference of branch delegates which debated and voted on motions proposed by branches; there was an executive committee elected by the branches and responsible for the week-to-week administration of the group’s affairs and for the implementation of conference decisions.

Within the framework of the group’s overall political position, branches were free to choose which line of activity to engage in; some chose to concentrate on the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign; others on tenants’ associations; others on combating racism; others on students, and so on. In the light of the various momentous events of 1968, which had led to a tripling of the size of his organisation, Cliff decided that this was not good enough and inaugurated a campaign to rein in branch autonomy. He proposed a more centralised structure which would allow the group’s interventions in the various struggles that were going on at any time to be organised in a more co-ordinated way; the body that would co-ordinate and to a certain extent direct the activities of the branches was to be the executive committee.

Since some degree of centralism is compatible with democracy, indeed is necessary to make it effective, this seemed a reasonable proposal and it was eventually accepted. In Cliff’s mind, however, this change was not seen as a move to make democracy function more effectively but as a step towards changing the IS group into an organisation based on Leninist ‘democratic centralist’ lines in which the executive committee would become a policy-making leadership.

IS entered the 70s with a constitution which was still recognisably democratic, similar in fact to the rulebook of a typical trade union. The annual conference remained the body which made the major policy decisions; its purpose remained to discuss the report of the executive committee and to debate and vote on motions proposed by branches. A given number of weeks before the conference branches were invited to submit motions; these were included in a provisional agenda that was sent to branches to allow them to submit amendments, which were then circulated in the form of a finished agenda for branches to vote and mandate their Conference delegates on. To take account of the increase in membership a new body was established between the Conference and the EC – the National Committee. The members of this large committee (of some 40 members) were elected by the conference from nominations made by branches and in turn they elected the EC from amongst their number; they met on a regular basis in between conferences to hear reports from the EC.

Cliff, however, was still not satisfied with this structure. The main problem for him was that it didn’t give the EC as the leadership a free enough hand since, at least on paper, it was still subject to some degree of control by the National Committee which elected it. Various ways were found round this: the composition of the EC was changed; its members were all made full-time officials; the EC arrogated to itself greater powers. In the end, however, the group’s constitution was changed to end the EC’s formal status as an emanation of the National Committee. In l975 the EC was given the more Leninist-sounding name of ‘central committee’ and was to be elected by the Conference rather than the National Committee; this latter was reduced to the role of a purely advisory body to the new Central Committee.

It was with this structure that the IS became the SWP at the beginning of 1977. But, as the experience of all trade unions (and, according to the partisans of the so-called ‘iron law of oligarchy’, of all large organisations) shows, there is a difference between an organisation’s formal constitution and the way it actually functions. On paper, the SWP’s statutes still allow some degree of democratic control by the membership: the branches could still decide policy and could still control the Central Committee through electing to it only those who carried out their will as decided at the annual Conference; the National Committee could check in between Conferences that the Central Committee was implementing Conference decisions. But this is not the way the SWP works in practice; nor is it the way it is supposed to work since such control from below, by the membership, has no place in the theory of ‘democratic centralism’ as laid down by Lenin.

David Lane has provided an objective and neutral description of what Lenin meant by this term:

‘By ‘democratic’ Lenin understood that decisions should be resolved according to majority vote of the central committee (of the executive) of the Party and that all Party members had the right to participate in general Party policy-making. The Party Congress was to be supreme over policy. There were to be periodic elections of the leading officers of the Party (. . .). By ‘centralism’, Lenin meant that once general policy was agreed, the day-to-day operation of the Party had to be decided centrally, where all information and the Party leadership are located, and the decisions of central bodies were absolutely binding on lower bodies. In Lenin’s view, democratic centralism was a synthesis between democracy and central control: it gave members the right to participation and it gave a creative role for the leadership’ (Leninism: A Sociological Interpretation, 1981, p 48).

Such a structure institutionalises the principle of leadership. Most existing political parties and trade unions do operate on this basis, where those at the top make all the keys decisions and generally control the organisation. Normally, however, this is not how these organisations are supposed to function; they are supposed to be controlled by their members. In this sense the practice of leadership is a departure from their formal constitutions and rulebooks. Leninism makes a virtue of this by not accepting that it is desirable that a political organisation of the sort they want should be organised on the basis of democratic control, and maximum participation in decision-making, by the membership. They are not afraid of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. They like it and want to facilitate its operation, indeed to institutionalise it.

The SWP is unashamedly a leadership organisation, not just in the sense that it seeks to lead the working class but also in the sense that it is organised internally on a leadership basis; in fact on a hierarchical basis where each layer of leadership has power over the levels below it, with the party’s national leadership – the members of its central committee – at the top.

The national leadership decides everything important and then seeks to get the membership to follow their lead. This is not necessarily a difficult task since the membership, who also believe in the organisational principle of ‘democratic centralism’, accept the leading role of the leadership and are generally prepared to follow. So Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’ places an enormous power in the hands of the leaders and in practice reduces the rank-and-file members to a mere consultative role.

Conference procedure

In Lenin’s scheme, as described by Lane, the supreme policy-making body is the Party Congress; this decides the general line which the Central Committee has to follow until the next Congress. This is the theory; the practice is that the Central Committee completely dominates the Congress (or Conference, as in one concession to the more normal usage in Britain, the SWP’s Congress is called).

The main item on the agenda is a report by the Central Committee on the political ‘perspectives’ which is usually a document of pamphlet-length. The Central Committee also submits other reports – on work in special areas of activity (industry, students, women), internal organisation, finance – for the Conference to discuss. In the SWP, branches still have the formal right to submit motions, but they are strongly discouraged from doing so. As an explanatory note intended for new members, accompanying documents submitted for the party’s 1983 Conference put it:

‘Branches can submit resolutions if they wish and these may [sic] be voted on. But in recent years the practice of sending resolutions to conference has virtually ceased’ (Socialist Review, September 1983).

What this means is that it is the Central Committee – the leadership – which quite literally sets the agenda for the Conference. The branch delegates meet, therefore, to discuss only what is put before them by the Central Committee. Not that the delegates are delegates in the proper sense of the term as instructed representatives of the branches sending them:

‘Delegates should not be mandated . . . Mandating is a trade union practice, with no place in a revolutionary party.’

Since voting on motions submitted by branches is dismissed as a ‘trade union practice’, another procedure, more open to manipulation by the leadership, is operated:

‘At the end of each session of conference commissions are elected to draw up a report on the session detailing the points made. In the event of disagreement two or more commissions can be elected by the opposing delegates. The reports are submitted to conference and delegates then vote in favour of one of the commissions. The advantage of this procedure is that conference does not have to proceed by resolution like a trade union conference.’

No branch motions, no mandated delegates, what else? No ballots of the entire membership either. In the first volume of his political biography of Lenin, Cliff records in shocked terms that ‘in January 1907 Lenin went so far as to argue for the institution of a referendum of all party members on the issues facing the party’, commenting ‘certainly a suggestion which ran counter to the whole idea of democratic centralism’ (Lenin, Building the Party, p. 280).

In fact no official of the SWP above branch level is directly elected by a vote of the members. One power that the branches do retain is the right to nominate members for election, by the Conference delegates, to the National Committee, but, as over presenting motions, they are discouraged from nominating people who do not accept the “perspectives” espoused by the Central Committee. So elections do take place to the National Committee but on the basis of personalities rather than politics. However, it is the way that the Central Committee is elected that is really novel: the nominations for election to new central committee are proposed not by branches but . . . by the outgoing central committee! Once again, in theory, branches can present other names but they never do.

It is easy to see how this means that the central committee – the supreme leadership of the organisation – is a self-perpetuating body renewed in effect only by co-optation. This is justified on the grounds of continuity and efficiency – it takes time to gain the experience necessary to become a good leader, so that it would be a waste of the experience gained if some leader were to be voted off by the vagaries of a democratic vote. Choosing the leadership by a competitive vote is evidently something else ‘with no place in a revolutionary party’ any more than in an army.

The full education document can be found here: 

 How the SWP Central Committee is selected

The CC consists of members elected by Conference according to the following procedure:

  The outgoing Central Committee selects and circulates a provisional slate for the new CC at the beginning of the period of pre-Conference discussion. This is then discussed at the district aggregates where comrades can propose alternative slates.
  At the Conference the outgoing CC proposes a final slate (which may have been changed as a result of the pre-Conference discussion). This slate, along with any other that is supported by a minimum of five delegates, is discussed and voted on by Conference. ((Rule 5 SWP Constitution)

Letters: Timeless Leninism? (2015)

Letters to the Editors from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Timeless Leninism?

Dear Editors

I think a careful reading of my document and of my biography of Tony Cliff would respond adequately to all your points (‘Where Leadership Leads’, February Socialist Standard). Indeed your author seems to have been rather careless in checking his facts – What is to be Done? was published in 1902 not 1903; much more seriously, your author simply disregards the arguments developed not only by Cliff, but by Hal Draper, Pierre Broué, Lars T Lih and many others about the place of What Is to be Done? in Lenin’s work, and whether it can be considered as a timeless statement of ‘Leninism’. Likewise the IS did not adopt the slate system until 1975, which rather undermines the claim that it is a central tenet of Leninism.  As for ‘what we’ve been saying for over 100 years’, that may well be true, but with what results? It is easy enough to point to the limited achievements of the Leninist left, but since your own achievements are equally thin on the ground, a more modest tone might be called for.

Ian Birchall

Reply:

We are aware that there is a school of historical revisionists who try to argue that Lenin was merely a left-wing Social Democrat. This may well be how he appeared when he participated in discussions within the Second International, but inside Russia he never gave up the idea that the revolution there would have to be led by a vanguard party of full-time revolutionaries organised on the lines he had outlined in his 1902 pamphlet and which had shocked other revolutionaries at the time such as Rosa Luxemburg and even Trotsky.

That he still held this view to the end can be seen from his other notorious pamphlet, Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, that came out in 1920. In chapter II, headed ‘One of the Basic Prerequisites for the Success of the Bolsheviks’, he wrote repeatedly about ‘absolute centralisation’ and ‘iron discipline’ and attributed the Bolsheviks’ success to this. He still clearly thought in terms of a centralised and disciplined vanguard party ‘leading and attracting the backward masses.’ The chapter can be read on the internet here.

There is also the fact that, historically, all parties and groups descended from the Bolshevik Party under Lenin, Trotskyist as well as Stalinist, have been organised as vanguard parties along the lines of his 1902 pamphlet. Frankly, we cannot understand how anyone can seriously argue that Lenin did not advocate a centralised and highly disciplined party of full-time revolutionaries.–Editors.

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More on Syriza

Dear Editors

I agree with the article written on page 10 of February Socialist Standard about Syriza. But Syriza is not simply a coalition of various left and green, etc. There are also various splits from the socialist party (like the Labour in England) and more important inside Syriza the most solid ideologically group are  the one of the ex-eurocommunist party of Greece that gave also to Syriza the ideological guidelines in a eurocommunist way like the 70s. The thinktank of Syriza is called ‘Nikos Poulantzas’. If somebody is sect-maniac I can send you a list of the groups that consist Syriza!

Anyway I think the next thing to be analyzed is why Syriza collaborated with a populist party to rule the country, but this is strictly a Greek peculiarity…

Theodore Desponis, 

Greece

Was Russia Ever Socialist . . ? (2017)

From the October 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

We examine the Socialist Party’s reaction to the Bolshevik coup d’état and recall the analysis of Soviet Russia the Party pioneered.

The apparent triumph of the Bolsheviks in the backward Russia of 1917 sent the Marxist movement into turmoil. Moreover, previously impotent political organisations across Europe and North America showed themselves to be more impressed by the sudden and unexpected success of revolutionaries in the midst of bloody world war, than concerned for the event’s potential impact on core elements of Marxist theory as they had always previously been understood. Contrary to legend, the Socialist Party was initially affected by this feeling like other radical parties, praising the Bolshevik’s successful attempts to remove Russia from the bloodbath that was the First World War.

As for what was happening in Russia at a deeper level, the Socialist Party was more sceptical. Indeed, what focused our attention above all were the lavish claims made on the Bolsheviks’ behalf by their supporters in Britain about ‘Red October’ (early November in the Western calendar). The first detailed analysis of the Russian situation, written by Jack Fitzgerald, appeared in the August 1918 Socialist Standard under the heading ‘The Revolution in Russia – Where It Fails’. It tackled the claims of the (then) Socialist Labour Party in Britain by outlining why the Bolshevik takeover could not really lead to the establishment of socialism in Russia. The article asked:

  ‘Is this huge mass of people, numbering about 160,000,000 and spread over eight and a half millions of square miles, ready for socialism? Are the hunters of the North, the struggling peasant proprietors of the South, the agricultural wage-slaves of the Central Provinces, and the industrial wage-slaves of the towns convinced of the necessity, and equipped with the knowledge requisite, for the establishment of the social ownership of the means of life?
  Unless a mental revolution such as the world has never seen before has taken place, or an economic change has occurred immensely more rapidly than history has ever recorded, the answer is ‘No!’ … What justification is there, then, in terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution? None whatever beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claim to be Marxian Socialists.’

In fact, over time the Socialist Party went on to identify as many as five key reasons why the establishment of socialism in Russia by the Bolsheviks was impossible:

• First, as indicated by Fitzgerald, the mass socialist consciousness needed before a successful socialist revolution could take place was noticeably absent in Russia, as elsewhere. Fitzgerald seized on a remark by Litvinoff which suggested that the Bolsheviks did not really know the views of the entire working class when they seized control, only some sections of it such as the factory workers of Petrograd.

• Second, it was not even the case that the working class was in a numerical majority in Russia, a society dominated by its peasant economy. How could a majority socialist revolution be carried out when the workers were still in a minority and when the largest social class were the largely illiterate peasantry? While illiteracy did not entirely preclude the spread of socialist understanding, it certainly made it more difficult. In any event, the peasants had long shown themselves more interested in ridding themselves of the heavy tax burden on land, and increasing the size of their plots, than in demanding common ownership.

• Third, socialism could not exist in an economically backward country where the means of production was not sufficiently developed to support a socialist system of distribution.

• Fourth, and crucially, it was not possible to construct socialism in one country alone, given the nature of capitalism as a world system with a world-wide division of labour. Isolated ‘socialism in one country’ would be doomed to failure, no matter how honourable the intentions of the revolutionaries involved.

• The fifth reason advanced for the non-socialist nature of Bolshevik Russia went to the very root of our political differences with Bolshevism: socialism could not be achieved by following leaders (enlightened or otherwise).

State capitalism

In the absence of world socialist revolution, there could realistically only be one road forward for semi-feudal Russia – the capitalist road. With the virtual elimination of the small Russian bourgeoisie, it would be necessary for the Bolsheviks to develop industry through the state ownership of enterprises and the forced accumulation of capital. In The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, written before the revolution, Lenin had envisaged just such an approach to the Russian crisis. According to this document, Lenin saw that immediate measures required included nationalisation of the existing banks and the formation of a single state bank, together with the nationalisation of all insurance companies, the nationalisation of the monopolies and all other key industrial concerns. The Socialist Standard took the opportunity to again cast doubt on the supposed general applicability of Bolshevik actions in Russia – in this instance, the development of ‘state capitalism’ as a precondition for the establishment of socialism:

   ‘If we are to copy Bolshevik policy in other countries we should have to demand State Capitalism, which is not a step towards Socialism in advanced capitalist countries. The fact remains, as Lenin is driven to confess, that we do not have to learn from Russia, but Russia has to learn from lands where large scale production is dominant’ (‘A Socialist View of Bolshevist Policy’, July 1920).

As we took great pains to point out to our pro-Bolshevik opponents, Lenin admitted that the social formation in Soviet Russia was essentially state-capitalist, albeit under the guidance and control of a so-called ‘proletarian state’ guided by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries. For Lenin, the nature of the revolutionary polity in such circumstances was the crucial determinant of the type of social system in existence. Without what Lenin termed ‘revolutionary democracy’, state capitalist monopoly would remain state capitalism. With workers’ control of production and control of the proletarian state by the vanguard party of the working class, however, socialism would be a reality. According to The Impending Catastrophe and How To Combat It, socialism was merely ‘state-capitalist monopoly made to serve the interests of the whole people’.

More than twenty years after the Bolshevik seizure of power, we remained unconvinced that state capitalism was really socialism even if presided over by those who proclaimed themselves socialist:

  ‘… the chief characteristics of Capitalism [in Russia] have not disappeared and are not in the process of disappearing. Goods are not produced for use but for sale to those who have the money to buy, as in other countries. The workers are not members of a social system in which the means of wealth production are socially owned and controlled, but are wage-earners in the employ of the State or of semi-State concerns, etc. The Russian State concerns are no more ‘socially owned’ than is the British Post Office or the Central Electricity Board, or any private company… The Bolshevik attempt to usher in Socialism by ‘legal enactments’ and by ‘bold leaps’ before the economic conditions were ripe, and before the mass of the population desired Socialism, has been a total failure. In course of time that failure will become obvious to the workers inside and outside Russia’ (Questions of the Day, 1942).

Capitalism, based on the separation of the producers from the means of production had not been abolished, nor could it have been. Production still took place as a system of exchange involving the circulation of capital. Capital expanded consequent on the exploitation of wage labour, and articles of wealth were still being produced for sale on the market with a view to the realisation of surplus value. Indeed, much of the Party’s early analysis of the economic basis of the Soviet system reflected a desire to demonstrate the similarities between Russian state capitalism and the British private enterprise-based capitalism the Party was most familiar with.

Who are the capitalist class?

Over time, while it was clear that state capitalism in Russia (and then its satellites) retained all the essential features of capitalism, there were some apparent differences, even if superficial. One related to who the capitalist class were in Russia, as the system’s supporters often claimed that capitalism could not really exist in Russia as there was no capitalist class in the traditional sense. But in fact, there was a capitalist class of this nature, as the 1940s pamphlet Soviet Millionaires by Reg Bishop showed, and always a private sector running in parallel to the major state-owned institutions and corporations – though it was peripheral. Nevertheless, it was clear that real power and control – including economic decision-making – rested with a powerful group of leading bureaucrats who had privileged lifestyles and high incomes as a result of their position at the top of the Soviet hierarchy.

This controlling class could not merely be equated with the supervisors and managers within capitalism referred to by Marx who received a wage based on the amount needed to produce and reproduce their labour power. On the contrary, this class of bureaucrats in Russia was using its position of control to perform the functions carried out by individual capitalists in earlier phases of capitalism’s development and to command a privileged income derived from surplus value. Though it did not have legal title to the means of production, and was not able to bequeath property, it was clearly a possessing class of the type mentioned in our Declaration of Principles, exercising a ‘monopoly… of the wealth taken from the workers’. This state capitalist class, like the privately owning capitalist class in the West, was privileged in consumption, receiving bloated ‘salaries’ that were not the price of labour power but a portion of the total surplus value created by the working class. They were also privileged because of the multitude of benefits and perks open to them, including access to exclusive consumption outlets such as expensive shops and restaurants from which the working class was physically denied access.

The prevailing view in the Socialist Party was that the nature of a class could not be determined simply by legal forms or even by methods of recruitment (the Soviet possessing class was not recruited via inheritance but by other, more meritocratic, methods that have not been entirely unusual for possessing classes in history). So the Party ultimately concluded that although the state capitalist class did not have legal property titles to the means of production, it nonetheless constituted a capitalist class exercising a collective ownership of the means of production and distribution. What was judged to be of prime importance, therefore, was the social reality of capitalism rather than a particular legal form; the opponents of the theory of state capitalism had never been able to see beyond the latter.

The theory of state capitalism

The Socialist Party of Great Britain was the first political group in Britain, and quite possibly the world, to identify the state capitalist direction taken by Russia under the Communist Party dictatorship, though many others came to the same conclusion over time, if not always for the same reasons. Unlike us, most of these groups stood in the Leninist tradition or at least showed a willingness to identify positive aspects of the Bolshevik takeover that could be applied by the socialist movement elsewhere in the future. In particular, the Leninist conception of socialism as state ownership and direction of the economy under the control of a vanguard party operating through the political medium of workers’ councils was readily accepted by most of these groups. Hence they only later ascribed a ‘state capitalist’ characterisation to Russia when they judged that state ownership no longer coincided with ‘proletarian democracy’ and the power of the soviets. This was essentially the analysis initially put forward by ‘council communists’ such as Otto Rühle who saw in the crushing of the soviets the rise of ‘commissar despotism’ and state capitalism (Rühle himself later realized the inadequacy of this position and came to view nationalisation and state regulation as intrinsically state capitalist). The largest ‘Left Communist’ group in Europe, the German KAPD, developed a similar perspective. It identified capitalism as the private (specifically non-state) ownership of the means of production, and, like the council communist Workers’ Socialist Federation in Britain, praised the Bolsheviks for their construction of socialism in the industrial centres of Russia. Later, the KAPD became critical of the Soviet system with the final crushing of the soviets and the introduction of the New Economic Policy, which it thought heralded a ‘reversion to capitalism’.

Despite the initial excesses of Left Communist and council communist groups who invariably let their early admiration for the Soviet political form dominate their analysis, arguably the worst example of the conflation of socialism with state ownership plus ‘revolutionary democracy’ came from the Trotskyists. Ironically, the Trotskyist theories of state capitalism, being by far the most fragile, are the most well-known. C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya from the American Socialist Workers’ Party were the first Trotskyists to break with Trotsky himself and identify the state capitalist nature of the USSR though perhaps the most widely known theory was that elaborated by Tony Cliff and circulated as a discussion document within the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain in the period immediately after the Second World War, before being published as Russia: A Marxist Analysis. Cliff – who was the driving force behind what became the British SWP – said his reasons for breaking with orthodox Trotskyism by identifying the Soviet Union as state capitalist were plain enough:

   ‘When I came to the theory of state capitalism I did not come to it by a long analysis of the law of value in Russia… Nothing of the sort. I came to it by the simple statement that… you cannot have a workers’ state without the workers having power to dictate what happens in society’ (interview with The Leveller, 30 September 1979).

In reality, Cliff had been heavily influenced by fellow Trotskyist Jock Haston about the Socialist Party’s view of state capitalism existing in Russia rather than socialism or a ‘workers’ state’, but Cliff could never break entirely with the perspectives of Lenin and Trotsky. Indeed, Cliff’s analysis was firmly rooted in the idea that the USSR was a form of ‘workers’ state’ before Stalin’s first Five Year Plan of 1928 established the bureaucracy as a new class consuming surplus value. Like all the Trotskyists that have followed him, Cliff did not identify the USSR as a society developing along state capitalist lines from 1917 but only from Stalin’s ascension to power. Under Lenin, Russia was supposedly a society in transition from capitalism to communism, based on working class power. For Cliff, a perceived change of political control led to a fundamental change in economic structure, to what in fact amounted to a ‘reversion to capitalism’. Perhaps surprisingly, those Trotskyists who remained faithful to Trotsky’s own view when in exile of Russia as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ made some of the most pertinent criticisms of Cliff’s analysis, particularly his conclusion that the economic structure of the Soviet system had changed in 1928 and had assumed a capitalist basis. Foremost among these critics was rival British Trotskyist Ted Grant (founder of what became Militant):

   ‘If Comrade Cliff’s thesis is correct, that state capitalism exists in Russia today, then he cannot avoid the conclusion that state capitalism has been in existence since the Russian Revolution and the function of the revolution itself was to introduce this state capitalist system of society. For despite his tortuous efforts to draw a line between the economic basis of Russia before the year 1928 and after, the economic basis of Russian society has remained unchanged… money, labour power, the existence of the working class, surplus value, etc. are all survivals of the old capitalist system carried over even under the regime of Lenin… the law of value applies and must apply until there is direct access to the products by the producers’ (Against the Theory of State Capitalism, 1949).

This conclusion was certainly rejected by Cliff and all the other Trotskyist state capitalist theorists, though not of course by us.

Today, many council communist, left communist and Trotskyist political groupings identify Soviet Russia, certainly post-Lenin, as having always been essentially state capitalist, and like us, they have applied their analysis of Russian society to other ‘socialist’ countries exhibiting similar features in Asia, Africa and Central America. That we were not alone in identifying the capitalist nature of the USSR does not of course diminish our position as the one organisation which promoted a state capitalist analysis of the events in Russia at the time of their happening, and not merely with the benefit of hindsight. What is more, we have remained one of the few organisations committed to such a critique of the USSR and similar regimes, that has never sought to adopt or promote the Leninist vanguardism which so clearly led to that state capitalist outcome.

Dave Perrin

Next month’s issue will be a special issue on ‘The Aftermath of Leninism’ looking at the surviving Leninist regimes today.