Gerry-built (2025)

Book Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Party is Always Right. By Aidan Beatty. Pluto Press. 2024.

This is sub-titled the ‘Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism’ though in truth most of it has been told before. The interesting addition is the number of interviews that have helped to add colour and richness to a grim story of political failure and an even grimmer tale of internal strife and abuse.

Alongside Ted Grant of the Militant Tendency and Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party, Gerry Healy was one of the three gurus of the British Trotskyist movement. While all three led organisations that had authoritarian tendencies, Healy’s outfit was by far the worst. Called the Socialist Labour League until it changed its name to the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1973, it became a byword for cult-like sectarianism and was infused with a rancid, hierarchical political culture which was framed and dominated by the leader himself. Healy was a tyrannical bully who often directed and oversaw violence against his political opponents (both inside and outside the party) and who was an expert manipulator. Indeed, that was arguably his main ‘talent’ such as it was and what kept him at the top of the organisation for so long.

Unlike Grant or Cliff, Healy was no theoretician with a knowledge of Marx, even though he liked to paint himself as such. Most of his attempts at establishing this sort of reputation for himself only served to expose his limitations, which were considerable. He was obsessed with Marxist dialectics, but his forays into this were generally just nonsense (Beatty quotes a few examples in case anyone was in any doubt).

Healy also seemed to possess relatively little knowledge of Marxist economics. He was the perennial catastrophist, constantly predicting that capitalism was in its final death agony and that the revolution was imminent. He was effectively saying the same thing in the 1970s and 80s as he had been in the 1950s. Yet the collapse never came.

Some argue that he had a certain charisma, which is why he was able to keep his hold on the party for so long. It was certainly enough to woo a number of high-profile celebrities into the orbit of the organisation, starting with the actor Corin Redgrave and then his more famous sister Vanessa, but including many others from Frances De La Tour to former Spurs football player Chris Hughton.

But this charisma – if that is what it was – was ultimately to prove the downfall of both Healy and the WRP. In 1985, Healy’s secretary Aileen Jennings wrote to the Political Committee of the WRP alleging that Healy was a serial manipulator and sexual abuser of women, naming 26 female victims, mainly party members. This eventually led to a predictable slew of lurid tabloid headlines and was a proverbial ‘hand grenade’ against its supreme leader from which the WRP never recovered. It split into myriad warring factions over the following years.

Healy himself then founded the Marxist Party with loyalists Vanessa and Corin Redgrave but died aged 76 in 1989 and this party – never more than about 50 or so – dwindled away to nothing. The surviving WRP led by Sheila Torrance is also now tiny (estimated at around 120 members at most) though still stands General Election candidates, as periodically does another small surviving faction, now called the Socialist Equality Party and linked to a US organisation of the same name led by David North (a Healy protégé).

At its peak the WRP may have had 3,000 members but when the split happened the party’s finances became one of the biggest bones of contention as it emerged that many of its assets were not actually registered in the name of the party itself, but through other byzantine and opaque structures – allegedly for security reasons. There was a Head Office (with no signage) on Clapham High Street in a building now occupied by Caffé Nero, eight apartments around the corner in Clapham Old Town (Healy himself lived in one of them), a ‘College of Marxist Education’ in rural Derbyshire, and a state-of-the-art printing works in Runcorn that had enabled the WRP to produce the first colour daily newspaper in Britain, News Line. There were also several ‘Youth Training Centres’ it had set up, at one stage several bookshops, and also fleets of vehicles including Healy’s BMW.

The party’s finances were actually another Achilles Heel, as it over-extended itself in a way that couldn’t be sustained through membership income and paper sales alone, however hard the leadership pushed the members and gave them impossible targets to meet. Hence Healy’s well-known soliciting of money from Iraq and – in particular – Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan regime (which also gave the WRP printing works considerable contracts, including for mass copies of the Green Book). Beatty is sceptical of some of the wilder claims that have been made about links with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the PLO as well, but there is little doubt that money came from both Iraq and Libya and was not unconnected with the virulently pro-Arab nationalist tone of much WRP literature.

This then leads us on to another theme – the paranoia and secrecy at the heart of the organisation. Healy was obsessed with the security services, spies and moles, and saw them everywhere. Anyone who crossed him was lucky to be called a ‘subjectivist idealist’ or similar, the alternative was that they were really a spy. Anecdotes about speakers at WRP meetings being asked to speak with their backs to the window (in case MI5 listening devices could pick up sensitive vibrations from the glass) were not entirely unfounded. In fact, the British state did show an interest in the WRP (especially in the 70s and 80s) though this was more because of its links to industrial disruption in the early 70s and then later links to foreign governments and their money, than any assessment of them being a credible domestic revolutionary threat.

Beatty says that the standard description of the WRP as a cult has something going for it, but is, of itself, inadequate because its internal practices were directly a product of its elitist political outlook:

‘Dismissing the WRP as a cult means ignoring the connection between the WRP’s authoritarian culture and the party’s Leninist structure. The WRP can and should be understood also as an extreme manifestation of Leninist vanguardism and its anti-democratic praxis’ (p. xvii).

We could not have put it better ourselves.

Dave Perrin

Typical trot (2001)

First-edition cover

Pamphlet Review from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘I Know How, But I Don’t Know Why’: George Orwell’s Conception of Totalitarianism. By Paul Flewers.

Flewers’s pamphlet is an attempt to outline and criticise George Orwell’s political views on totalitarianism as revealed especially through 1984 and Animal Farm. As an explanation of why Orwell came to write his masterworks this is a good account. Flewers indicates the way Orwell’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War transformed his thinking, leading to a near-obsession with totalitarianism (particularly vis-à-vis Russia), and picks out his underlying motivation—the quest for “decency”.

As criticism however the work is deficient. In a nutshell, Flewers says that Orwell lacked a clear idea of how Russia became a totalitarian state because he could only observe without analysing. Since Orwell despised grand theories this is hardly surprising. But the deficiency lies not with Orwell but with Flewers. “Why was there no Lenin figure in Animal Farm?” he asks. Why overlook “the democratic features of Bolshevism?” (hack, cough) or view Lenin’s opportunism in 1917 as a “disingenuous and dishonest ruse to win support” (yessiree!). Besides the fact that Animal Farm is satire (I might just as pedantically ask “where’s Martov got to?” or “why doesn’t Makhno make a cameo?”), Orwell makes clear what his intentions were in Animal Farm: “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself.” Flewers of course denies that “any leadership will inevitably become a ruling elite once it seizes power”. As a Trot he would, wouldn’t he?

Kaz.

Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories: What Next? (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

“cooperatives will never be able to outcompete ordinary capitalist enterprises”

In November anti-capitalists were urged, via email, to send a letter of protest to the President of Argentina about the threat to evict the workers cooperative, set up by former employees, that took over the bankrupt Bauen Hotel in the centre of Buenos Aires two years ago and has been running it ever since.  When in December 2001 the Argentine economy and currency began a melt-down many small and medium-sized enterprises went bankrupt or were simply abandoned by their owners. Faced with joining the already huge and growing army of unemployed, workers in some of these businesses took matters into their own hands. They occupied the workplace and resumed production on their own account.

At the time some saw this as the beginning of a social revolution in which the  workers take over the factories and organise production without the bosses. A more sober assessment was that this was workers, in a crisis situation, reacting in a pragmatic fashion to try to ensure that they had some source of income to maintain themselves and their families. But it did at least show, to any who might not have realised it, that workers can organise production without bosses.

This was not really a mass movement, but it currently involves some 200 enterprises employing in total a maximum of 10,000 people, i.e. the average “recuperated enterprise” as they call themselves (recuperated, that is, from bosses regarded as undeserving or even thieving) is one employing about 50 workers. And 10,000 less unemployed is a drop in the ocean compared with the total number of unemployed in Argentina which, even today, is still over 2 million.

The authorities, not wishing to aggravate an already disastrous economic and financial crisis, accepted this situation as a fait accompli and passed a law allowing workers cooperatives to play a part in rescuing failed businesses. Under this law, local and regional authorities were empowered to compulsorily acquire a failed business and authorise it to be run by a workers cooperative for up to two years pending a settlement with other creditors (the workers themselves were often also creditors in respect of unpaid wages) or the former owners. Some recuperated enterprises went down this road. Others negotiated a lease with the former owners, which of course involved paying them a share of any profits. Others continued to operate outside the law.

The two years are now coming up, and with the Argentine economy having recovered a little and the social and political situation stabilised, the authorities are beginning to enforce the law, which gives property rights over a business either to the former owners or their creditors. A number of businesses taken over by the workers in 2002 have already been recuperated back from them. Now, it appears, it is the turn of the Bauen Hotel. 

Evicting the bosses and organising production without them is one thing; escaping from the economic laws of the market is another – as, within capitalism, it is not just a question of organising production, but also of selling what is produced. Because of their precarious legal position, the workers cooperatives running a recuperated enterprise have been at a competitive disadvantage. They can’t get proper bank loans and, because ordinary capitalist businesses are not too keen to deal with them, often have to sell to them via a go-between (who naturally demands a share of the profits).

What the workers cooperatives, some of which  are organised in a Movimento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas, are now demanding is a stable legal framework; basically, that the state or regional or local authorities compulsorily purchase the business they are running and legally hand it over to them. Thus, the petition to the President of Argentina on behalf of the Bauen Hotel cooperative calls upon “the Argentinian government and its legislators to act  immediately to . . . pass a law of definitive expropriation in favour of the Workplace cooperative B.A.U.E.N.”

Apart from wanting to secure their own position, the broader vision of those behind the Bauen cooperative seems to be an economy based on a network of worker-owned businesses. Even anarchists in Argentina, who might be expected to look favourably on this, have criticised it:

“Cooperativism does not provide a real solution to the workers’ situation. It is incapable of providing an answer in the interests of all workers. At no time does it question the capitalist production relationships – it questions only superficial features (monopolies, competition, etc.). Even less can a network of cooperatives create a parallel subsystem to capitalism” (www.zabalaza.net/phorum/read.php?f=2&i=156&t=156).

Yes, cooperatives can only ever involve a minority of workers, and the more they are integrated into the capitalist economy and its profit-seeking, the more their members will have to discipline and pressurise themselves in the way the old bosses did – what used to be known as “self-managed exploitation”.

The Trotskyists have another solution. According to an article in the October Le Monde Diplomatique:

“During 2002 there was a lively debate on whether revived businesses should get involved in capitalist markets. A Trotskyist minority called for nationalisation under worker control. It took over four businesses, including Brukman, a garment factory in Buenos Aires, and Zenon, a tile manufacturer in Neuquén. The workers involved saw the rescue as a first step towards a socialist system in which the state would control economic planning. The hard-left parties associated with them did not believe that cooperatives could survive in a capitalist market” (mondediplo.com/2005/10/13survey).

It is certainly true that cooperatives will never be able to outcompete ordinary capitalist enterprises, but the Trotskyists’ alternative of the state subsidising the recuperated enterprises, without requiring them to compete in the marketplace, just to provide jobs is even more unrealistic – and has nothing to do with socialism. (It is more than likely, however, that this is just another of the Trotskyists’ dishonest “transitional demands” which they know can’t be achieved under capitalism but offered as bait to obtain a following for their vanguard party.)

The fact is that there is no way out for workers within the capitalist system. Not cooperatives, not reforms, not trade unions. At most these can only make their situation a little less unbearable. As long as capitalism lasts workers will have to find a source of money one way or another and so will always be in a dependent and precarious position. 

But a number of lessons can be drawn from the recuperated enterprises movement in Argentina.

Firstly, that built into capitalism is a class struggle between those who own the means of wealth production and those who don’t and who are therefore forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work to those who do. This class struggle is not just over the price and conditions of sale of the commodity workers are selling.

Ultimately, it’s about control over the means of production.  If, as happened in Argentina after the economic melt-down of December 2001, capitalists abandon their factories or, as happened in Russia in 1917, Spain in 1936, and Hungary in 1956, the capitalist state is temporarily incapable of protecting capitalist property, then the workers more or less spontaneously take over their workplaces and keep production going.

Workers are not going to let themselves starve: if the means of production are there, and there’s no state to stop them using them, they’ll go ahead and use them, even if they have no revolutionary pretensions. However, as soon as the state has got its act together again, then it is in a position to confront the workers and re-impose access to the means of production only on its terms.

Which leads to the second lesson: the importance of who controls the state. At the moment, in Argentina as elsewhere, this is in the hands of people favourable to the continuation of capitalism, itself a reflection of the fact that most workers too don’t see any alternative to capitalism. The state, therefore, upholds legal private property rights. The importance of political power is in fact fully recognised by the recuperated enterprises movement.  This is why they are calling for the law on property rights to be changed so as to recognise the property rights of the workers cooperatives which are running recuperated enterprises; which will only happen if they can get the elected law-makers to do so, either by pressuring them from outside or by electing ones  favourable to a change in the law. This is why, too, they want people to petition the President of Argentina.

The end of capitalism can only come as a result of a consciously socialist political movement winning control of political power with a view to abolishing all capitalist property rights and ushering in the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. The preconditions for ending capitalism are a majority socialist consciousness and workers democratically self-organised in a large-scale socialist party. Neither of which, unfortunately, existed in Argentina.

Which is why the recuperated enterprises movement there has proved a dead-end and why the workers cooperatives it gave rise to are now forced to compromise and integrate themselves into capitalism to survive.

Adam Buick

Revolutionary (2010)

Book Review from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stefan.

Party News: Ukraine (2003)

Party News from the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In this column in March we reported that a party had been formed in the Ukraine with the same object and declaration of principles as us,

It now turns out that a hoax was involved, part of an elaborate scam to extract money from political groups in  Europe and North America to finance the activities of a Trotskyist group in the Ukraine (a sister organisation of Militant in this country in the so-called "Committee for a Workers International"). Members of this group would contact groups in the West by email feigning agreement with the latter's political positions. Money sent ended up in the coffers of the Trotskyist group. At least ten groups seem to have been taken in by this scam including, besides ourselves, the SLP of America, the Socialist Studies group, and various rival Trotskyist outfits to Militant.

We know that vanguardist groups resort to underhand tactics as a matter of principle but this is a particularly devious example.

Enter the Twilight Zone (2023)

Book Review from the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Twilight of World Trotskyism, By John Kelly. Routledge. 2023.

This is effectively the updated sequel to Kelly’s book Contemporary Trotskyism, which was reviewed in the October 2018 Socialist Standard. It is a lot shorter than the first, more international in outlook, a little repetitive in places and surprisingly polemical.

Kelly argues that after a period of significant decline, the Trotskyist movement worldwide entered a period of relative stability in the early 21st century which has in more recent years been shattered by another period of organisational sclerosis, bloodletting and waning membership. There are now no less than 32 international organisations claiming to be the Fourth International or its successor, and in the UK alone there are currently 21 separate Trotskyist organisations that openly identify as being such.

One of the most significant recent splits concerns the so-called Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW) and its international body, the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). This split has been over the growth of identity politics linked to their Irish affiliate and led to the formation in the UK of the 200-strong Socialist Alternative group. Kelly estimates there are now around 9,000 Trotskyists in total in the UK, the majority of them in the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and SPEW, the only parties with over a thousand members – though in SPEW’s case only just.

Kelly identifies the main centres of World Trotskyism as being the USA, Britain, France and Argentina (based on parties, memberships, publications, electoral statistics, etc). The organisational issues noticeable in Britain are equally obvious elsewhere – the USA has 23 separate Trotskyist groups, France 15 and Argentina 16. He attempts to look beyond the sect-like nature of these groups to some of the more fundamental underlying issues with Trotskyist politics that we have often identified ourselves in this magazine. These include the dishonest and incredible nature of ‘transitional demands’; Trotskyists’ rigid adherence to Leninist methods while bizarrely expecting a different outcome to those achieved by Leninists previously in Russia, China, etc; their obsessive catastrophising (a massive world crisis and revolution is always just around the corner, yet somehow never materialises); and their conceptions of how members may be recruited and supporters gained that bear little relationship to the underlying reality.

Over the years we ourselves have had some political sport pointing these things out, and have sparred with more Citizen Smith clones occupying a Trotskyist parallel universe than we care to remember. Though it’s also fair to say that at least some of the failures and limitations experienced by the Trotskyists (and others that seek to position themselves more generally as anti-capitalists) could also apply to us. Indeed, Kelly emerges as something of a reformist in this book and takes a sideswipe in our direction, saying ‘Tony Judt’s remark about the British propaganda sect, the SPGB, applies with equal force to [many of the Trotskyists]: “Impervious to change, and too small to be adversely affected by its own irrelevance, it will presumably survive indefinitely”’ (p.98). This didn’t make much sense the first time we read it and it makes little more sense here. Also, it is a bit odd as nowhere does he explain to readers what the SPGB is (we’re not even in the List of Abbreviations included) and because his main argument in this section appears to be that many of the Trotskyist groups are actually ageing out of activity and existence completely: ‘It appears that instead of being carried forward to revolutionary triumph by the laws of history, the forces of Orthodox Trotskyism are being carried into oblivion by the law of biology’ (p.99).

Kelly ends by saying ‘After more than 80 years of Trotskyist activity, with no revolutions, mass parties or election victories to its name… the Trotskyist movement has become a dead end for socialists’ (p.105). We can, of course, agree. But it’s a shame he doesn’t seem to hold the view that the same comment could be applied – equally though for partly different reasons – to the Labour and Social Democratic parties. Their repeated failure to successfully reform the market economy has driven the politically frustrated into the hands of Leninists of all varieties for decades – and we suspect Keir Starmer’s likely pending government will keep them in business for quite a while yet.

DAP

Trotwatching (2000)

Book Review from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Adherents of Permanent Revolution: A History of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International’. By Barry Lee Woolley (University Press of America, 1999)

With the decline in the fortunes of the left-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus, books about the organisations of the radical left – once commonplace – are now much rarer. Here Barry Lee Woolley charts the rise and fall of the Fourth International in a largely narrative account of the coalescence of the Trotskyist movement at the International’s foundation in 1938 through its various sclerotic episodes in the post-war period until the mid-1970s.

Though much of it is well researched, this is an unusual work for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is rather US-centric, focusing overmuch on the role of the US Socialist Workers Party in the Fourth International. As Woolley is a former member of the American SWP and still has a great number of contacts in the US Trotskyist movement, this is perhaps understandable; whatever, Woolley certainly provides a good genealogical chart of the US Trotskyist movement and is able to calculate that in America alone three new Trotskyist parties have arisen on average per year.

Rather less understandable than all this is his current political orientation which seems to owe less to the political God Trotsky than the Christian Lord Almighty worshipped by the evangelicals in the American Bible Belt. This is evidenced in his peculiar obsession with ‘morals’ in general and male homosexuality in particular, the growth of which he claims was largely responsible for changing the outlook of the world Trotskyist movement in the 1960s:

“[a] change in recruitment patterns transformed the predominantly burly worker cadres of the early Trotskyist movement into the predominantly petty bourgeois, college-recruited, effeminate cadres of the world Trotskyist movement at the time of the tenth World Congress . . . [The Socialist Workers Party] even participated in the building of mass marches around the issue of special legal privileges for sodomites.”

Woolley would certainly appear to have an unhealthy preoccupation with this topic, with one chapter even having the bizarre, incomprehensible by-line “Socialist Sodomites and Sorcery”. Perhaps Woolley is living testament to the charge that membership of Trotskyist sects buggers up the brain.

Despite the large amount of time that has clearly gone into producing this generally well-referenced work, there are a number of factual errors too. The account of the British Trotskyist movement is good if only partial, but there really is no excuse for Woolley referring to British Trotskyist leader Tony Cliff as Ygael Gluckstadt when he is correctly mentioned elsewhere as Ygael Gluckstein. There are many other similar errors, so much so that they eventually become annoying.

Woolley is shortly to produce another volume, this time on the history of the American Trotskyist movement. For his sake and ours let’s hope he gets in contact with a good therapist before then, preferably one that can also give him a hand with his proof-reading.

Dave Perrin

Sixties Man (1998)

Book Review from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

1968 Marching in the streets by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins. Bloomsbury, London 1998. £20.

Hey man, ’68 was so great! Like everything was happening all at once and everyone was groovy. Tarry tells it like it was. There was like Vietnam, man. The Cong versus the US. Sampson versus Goliath like. Ho was the man there man. Like he was never just another nationalist dictator. Yeah right. “Hell no we won’t go.” Unless it’s someone we really dislike like the Nazis. Then there was Che, man. He was like Jesus, man. And like Che had nothing to do with the repressive Cuban regime at all. And there was Czechoslovakia too. Dubcek and “state managed capitalism with a human face”. Or whatever it was. Then there was the students in Paris, man, who were like really radical and didn’t just want bigger beds and bigger grants at all. There was a real revolutionary situation there, man. Although de Gaulle did get a totally massive election victory. We all loved Meow, the Chinese cat, too. After all millions of dead red Chinese can’t be wrong. And then there was Free Love, man. Which didn’t just mean I could get laid more often. And we weren’t like just into getting stoned like today’s kids who smoke dope and do LSD all the time. Everyone was just so radical and everyone was out marching just like Enoch Powell, man. And rioting: “to loot is to liberate”. Unless it’s my shop of course. Then there was like the Blacks thing, man, and Women’s Liberation. Those things changed the world forever, man. Like Blacks aren’t discriminated against at all now and women still don’t get the shitty end of the stick. Now like everyone’s totally sold out, man, they used to be so radical and now they’re like bourgeois. Not Tarry though. Even though he’s got a job on the TV and he’s a rich man, man.

Repeat this mournful, self-indulgent, semi-Trot dirge until bored to death or organise for a real socialist revolution.

Kaz.

A Trotskyist Oddity (2020)

Book Review from the July 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

I Want To Believe: Posadism, UFOs and apocalypse communism by A.M. Gittlitz. Pluto Press, 

The Argentinian Trotskyist J. Posadas is mostly known among left trainspotter circles for his belief in UFOs and advocacy of nuclear war. This book reveals a different story. Rather than a crankish outlier, he is revealed as pretty much a typical guru of a Trotskyist sect, with policies and positions typical of mainstream Trotskyism.

Born Homero Cristalli, in 1912 in Buenos Aires, he was the child of Italian immigrant shoemakers, who were themselves involved in left-wing politics. He grew up malnourished, and became an entertainer, and (briefly) a professional footballer. Football would be an enduring feature of his life, and his cadres at conferences would be required to have a match, leading in one instance to the French police being called to their supposedly secret meeting place because neighbours heard the shouting.

He became involved in the radical Buenos Aires milieu, and came to the notice of a group of Trotskyists after a short poem calling for unity with the Spanish government (during the civil war) he wrote was published in a left newspaper. The group, the International Communist League (LCI) had been typified as ‘coffee-bar wankers’ (the author, incorrectly, attributes this to Trotsky himself), and were seeking to break out of their intellectual ghetto and connect with the working class.

Cristalli proved to be an enthusiastic and energetic organiser, and made successful work with the shoemakers union. His working class authenticity made up for his limited theoretical grasp of Trotskyist positions. J. Posadas was a collective name of the group’s leadership, and Cristalli began to join in writing Posadas’s editorials. Eventually, he would possess the name entirely (the ‘J.’ was never defined).

Although Trotsky is venerated in many parts for his theoretical subtlety, in reality, his plans amounted to ‘go back to your constituencies and prepare for civil war’. His orientation was to try and form the command/control of a military force that could win that civil war, hence his and his followers focus on leadership. In practice this usually meant small groups trying to orientate towards and piggyback on bigger movements. In Argentina, this meant the strongman Juan Peron, who successfully co-opted the workers movement for his own ends.

Cristalli became a full time revolutionary, depending on the income his faction could bring in from its membership in the Fourth International, and he came to prominence in the internecine manoeuvring of the factions in the international, and became a supporter of Michel Pablo, who ostensibly led the International after Trotsky’s murder. This position, along with his energy and charisma, led him to being among the pre-eminent Trotskyists in Latin America, eventually with groups in Cuba, Brazil and Ecuador.

When the Second World War failed to bring about the revolutionary wave Trotsky predicted, the Fourth International’s leadership veered between trying to enter mass communist parties or supporting anti-colonial guerrilla movements. Cristalli visited Cuba after the revolution there and ended up being singled out as a leader of the Fourth International by Castro as he denounced and suppressed Cuban Trotskyists.

It was the Cuban missile crisis that developed Cristalli’s position on nuclear weapons. He was, though, not alone in wanting a nuclear confrontation with America: Che Guevara and Castro both wanted the conflagration. Cristalli’s position was that the imperialist states would not surrender to socialism without using their nuclear weapons, such a confrontation was inevitable; but that with the greater population of the communist world, only communism could emerge from the aftermath. This was simply a logical continuation of the basic position of Trotskyism to a world with nuclear weapons.

His other famous position, on extra-terrestrials being communists, was in fact not his position. Gittliz reveals that his notorious essay, ‘Flying saucers, the process of matter and energy, science, the revolutionary and working-class struggle and the socialist future of mankind’, was in fact written to close down debate from an enthusiast for UFOs in his party. In some senses his argument ‘We must appeal to the beings on other planets, when they come here, to intervene and collaborate with Earth’s inhabitants in suppressing poverty. We must make this call to them’ is simply a continuation of the notion of appealing to powerful figures to try and make changes.

 The UFOs simply became a distinguishing feature by which other Trotskyists could deride him and distinguish themselves from his organisation.

The secrecy of Cristalli’s organisation was essential in the face of real repression (some of the cadres were arrested and murdered by repressive regimes in Latin America). This, coupled with stern sexual moralism (including seeing homosexuality as degenerate) led to Cristalli controlling the sex lives of his cadres, separating married couples to work in different areas. He abandoned ‘democratic centralism’ in favour of his personal rule of the organisation, or ‘monolithism’.

It comes as no surprise to discover that he was caught receiving oral sex from a young female recruit. He responded in a fashion we are becoming accustomed to from the US president, of accusing all of his colleagues of being sexually promiscuous. He expelled them all, and then fathered a child with the recruit. As Gittlitz notes, this situation is not unique, and other Trotskyist sects had similar stories (Gerry Healy and the WRP springs to mind).

The book ends with an essay on the birth of the Posadas meme as a generation of young leftists rehabilitate the Ufological legend for the slogan ‘Fully automated space communism’, used ironically but still indicating a search for hope in a time of fallen ideas. Gittlitz points out that for a short period, references to Posadas outranked Trotsky himself in Google searches thanks to the memes.

Pik Smeet

International politics (2011)

Book Review from the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxism and World Politics. Contesting Global Capitalism, edited by Alexander Anievas. Routledge, 2011

One of the roles of academics is to clarify the concepts used in everyday talk. The trouble is that today they are obliged to come up with something new, so now we have “MIRT” – Marxist International Relations Theory – , though most of those involved seem to be Trotskyist or Trotskyoid.

The basic subject is interesting. Why, when there is only one global economic system, is the world divided into separate states? Is this something capitalism created or did it simply inherit it? Is it intrinsically necessary to capitalism? Could capitalism exist with a single world state? If not, why not?

These are discussed by the different authors in this collection of articles. The clearest and most informative, in terms of setting out the issues simply, is that by Neil Davidson. Most of the others employ an obscure terminology which no-one outside academia, indeed outside the small circle of those discussing MIRT, uses. As one of them revealingly, but apparently unself-consciously, noted:

 “A fellow traveller amongst Marxist circles – though not a Marxist himself – once asked us what was all the fuss about U&CD and ‘the international’. In exasperation with the whole debate, he threw up his hands declaring: ‘This uneven and combined shit is the dog’s whistle that only Marxists can hear’!”

True, very true, as long as you substitute “Trotskyist” for “Marxist”.

Adam Buick

The French Non-Revolution (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

France ten years ago this month. Barricades in the streets of Paris. Ten million workers on strike. Factory occupations. No wonder some people were misled into thinking that a revolutionary situation existed which might have ended in the take-over of power by the working class. But in fact this was never even the remotest possibility. No revolutionary situation existed.

Students and workers were certainly, for different reasons, discontented but mere discontent, however deep, is not the same thing as a positive desire for revolutionary change. A real revolutionary situation will only exist when the great majority of wage and salary earners have come to consciously want and understand the revolutionary change which the establishment of Socialism in place of capitalism will represent, and will express itself as democratic political action via the ballot box and not as barricades and factory occupations. This was not the case in France in May 1968.

The students’ leaders — “Dany le Rouge” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now settled down as a lawyer in Germany), Alain Krivine (still a leading French Trotskyist), Alain Geismar (later a Maoist, for a while), etc.—together with a minority of students proclaimed themselves “revolutionaries” and issued appeals to the workers to take power and overthrow capitalism. They were encouraged in this by the fact that it was undoubtedly their occupation of the Sorbonne and subsequent clashes with the police that had sparked off the general strike. But a majority even of students were only discontented with the archaic French university system and would have been satisfied with reforms in this field—and were in fact to be when the Gaullist government later changed the system.

As for the workers, even though the first factory occupation, that of Sud-Aviation at Nantes, occurred in an area with a strong anarcho-syndicalist tradition, their demands were strictly of a trade-union nature: higher wages and shorter working hours. The trade union leaders, including those of the Communist Party dominated CGT, realised this and used the general strike as a means of extracting improvements in wages and conditions from employers and the government.

Industrial action

From this point of view, that of an industrial action to get the employers to disgorge a little more of the wealth they had taken from the workers, the strike can be rated a success. But even though it was part of the class struggle, and as such had the support of the SPGB (expressed in a leaflet issued by our Executive Committee in French), the general strike had nothing to do with Socialism. The factories had been occupied, not with a view to taking them over and producing for use instead of profit, but simply as a means of bringing pressure to bear on employers to concede some improvements on the industrial field.

The non-revolutionary situation in France was to be confirmed in the elections De Gaulle called in June after the strike was over. His Gaullist party and other openly conservative groupings swept back to power in a landslide victory which gave them 359 of the 487 seats in the National Assembly.

Student leaders

The student leaders accused the Communist Party of “betraying the revolution”. Cohn-Bendit referred to them as “stalinist scum” and they replied by calling him a “foreign anarchist”. But this was an illogical accusation. For you can only betray something if you actually stand for it. But the French Communist Party had long ceased to be the Bolshevik vanguard party the student leaders wanted it to behave like and had become thoroughly reformist, though remaining a dangerously disciplined party dictatorially controlled by its leaders. And if they had seized power the student leaders would not have liked the result: the establishment of a bureaucratic state capitalist regime as in Russia. Or would they? Cohn-Bendit’s position as an anarchist was clear on this point but the others were Trotskyists or Maoists wedded to the idea of a vanguard party seizing power and ruling in the name of the workers—in other words, a Leninist dictatorship over the proletariat. From this point of view the workers were sensible to have ignored the students’ appeals and to have used the strike to pursue industrial ends only.

The May events did however have a profound effect on the thinking of the “extreme left”, and not only in France. For the wildest dreams of students who make up the bulk of the membership of all Trotskyist and Maoist sects — as someone once put it, left to themselves students are capable of acquiring only a Leninist consciousness!—seemed to have been confirmed : they, a student vanguard, had been the catalyst that had set the working class in motion. If this had been done once, they argued, it could be done again, and they changed their tactics to trying to influence the working class directly instead of through “the mass party of the working class”, which in France meant for them the Communist Party and the CGT. Far from appreciating being used as an access to workers for Trotskyists the French CP did not hesitate even to employ physical violence against Trotskyist literature sellers at meetings and outside factories. Not that this shook the Trotskyists’ pigheaded resolve to be where they thought the workers were.

Entryism

The May events thus led to Trotskyists in all countries, including Britain, abandoning the tactic of “entryism” into Communist and Labour parties (though not that of electoral support for them) and to come out into the open as independent groups in their own right. 1968 marked the start of a process which has led in Britain to the appearance on the political scene of a “Socialist Workers Party” and of a “Workers Revolutionary Party”, direct descendants of groups which throughout the fifties and sixties had been accusing us of being “sectarian” and “cut off from the working class” for maintaining a party independent of and opposed to the Labour Party.

We drew a different, indeed opposite, lesson from the May events. The continuation of capitalism in France confirmed that as long as the working class are not conscious socialists capitalism is safe. Socialism can only be established by democratic political action through the ballot box when once the vast majority of wage and salary earners have come to want and understand it. The emancipation of the working class, as Marx had pointed out years ago, must be the work of the working class itself and not of some self- appointed minority.

Adam Buick

'Anti-apartheid' denounced (1970)

From the May 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-apartheid was denounced as a slogan of British imperialism at a meeting in Conway Hall, London, on 16 March addressed by I. B. Tabata, President of the Unity Movement of South Africa and N. Honono, President of the All-African Convention (a constituent organisation of the Unity Movement).

The South African ruling class, argued Tabata (what follows is only a summary of his arguments not an exact report of his speech), was split over how to govern the millions of African workers and peasants on whose labour the South African capitalist economy rested. The bulk of the industrial wealth of South Africa was owned either by capitalists from Britain or the English-speaking section of the White population. British imperialism had come to realise that it was no longer necessary to govern places like India and Africa by means of direct colonial rule. They had learned that it was cheaper and less inconvenient to rule through “independent” governments. However the bulk of the South African electorate, made up of White workers and farmers, was Afrikaans-speaking and traditionally opposed to British imperialism. They followed the lead of the Nationalist Party which preached that the only way to govern the Africans was by police methods. Brutal apartheid was the implementation of this policy of suppression. This the British capitalists and their counter-parts in South Africa, like gold magnate Oppenheimer, regarded as unnecessary and even dangerous in that it could provoke unrest and violence that would endanger their investments. They would prefer to rule through the White opposition parties (with their policy of less rigid segregation) or even, if necessary through organisations like the African National Congress. The “anti-apartheid" campaign by obscuring the class struggle of the African peasants and workers against capitalist exploitation and oppression, served their interests. As the Unity Movement put it in their pamphlet The Revolutionary Road for South Africa:

  In terms of the South African set-up, anti-apartheid means anti-Afrikaner Nationalist Government. It means the return to power of the English speaking sections. It means the entrenchment of imperialism in South Africa and all that that connotes for the exploitation of the mass of the Black population.

This is an analysis which the Socialist Party of Great Britain would largely endorse and is one reason why we do not take part in single-issue campaigns such as “Boycott South African Goods” and "Stop the Cricket Tour”. It is in fact in line with what we ourselves have long argued: that the rigid apartheid imposed by a government drawing its support from a farm-orientated electorate is a hindrance to the development of capitalism in South Africa and is against the interests of both the South African capitalist class and the international capitalists who have investments there. We have always rejected the facile view that apartheid is imposed by these capitalists in order to protect their investments.

The Socialist Party is of course opposed to apartheid, but to separate the struggle against apartheid and other forms of oppression and discrimination from the general struggle for Socialism (which will mean the emancipation of all mankind, irrespective of race or sex) is to play into the hands of that section of the South African ruling class that is opposed to apartheid.

We also have fundamental criticisms of the programme and policy of the Unity Movement, which is heavily influenced by obsolete trotskyist ideas about Russia and China being “workers states”, about leadership and "transitional demands” and about guerilla warfare. Nevertheless, on the issue of anti-apartheid, we concede that they take up a basically correct position. Wc doubt however whether their supporters in this country, who include Tariq Ali, really understand the full implications of this line of argument.

Letters: Debate on Europe (yawn) (2002)

Letters to the Editors from the April 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Debate on Europe (yawn)

Dear Editors,

Your reply to my letter (February Socialist Standard), on the potential political dangers of the euro and any future European nation state, requires response to the questions you raised.

1. My “nightmare scenario” of a possible fascist European state emerging, if the capitalist system became endangered, was deliberate and justified with our knowledge and experiences of Europe’s history of the 20th century.

2. While all states do exist “to uphold class rule and production for profit” it is essential to realise that a “democratic” capitalist state is vastly different from an “authoritarian dictatorship” where organising for socialism is not tolerated.

3. Troops sent from other parts of Europe into Britain to quell social unrest are much more likely to use ruthless methods of repression than indigenous forces.

4. “Europe a nation” and “European Union” was the policy first advocated by Sir Oswald Mosley in 1948 as Western Europe’s post-war fascist agenda to salvage its aims to defend capitalism and oppose socialist ideas by force.

5. Romano Prodi, European Commission President, has now declared that “the present members of the EU must lose their power to veto EU decisions” (Daily Mail, 12 January). This is further confirmation of the agenda to build a European Superstate and the real dangers for the working class.

Lionel Rich, 

London NW6

Reply:

You seem to have been reading the Daily Mail too much, though we don’t think even they have come up with the idea of a fascist Europe sending foreign troops to quell social unrest in Britain. We don’t accept, either, that fascism in Italy and Germany in between the two world wars of the last century was a response to the capitalist system becoming endangered; at most it was a response to the problems faced by the capitalist class in these two particular states due to them being excluded from a place in the sun (access to markets and raw materials) by the US, Britain and France.

Let’s start on the purely factual level. Under the present structure of the EU the power to make EU laws rests not with the Commission (whose role is essentially only to propose legislation) nor with the European Parliament (whose role is still largely consultative) but with the Council of Ministers composed of ministers, varying with the subject, from the (currently) 15 Member-States. Even then the Council of Ministers cannot make laws on all subjects but only on those permitted under various treaties (Rome, Maastricht, Amsterdam, and soon Nice) and which are essentially economic. Some of these decisions require unanimity, i.e. every state has a veto; others are taken by a majority vote, but one which in which the bigger states have more votes than the smaller ones.

When Prodi says that Member States must give up their veto what he is advocating is that the Council of Ministers should take more decisions by majority voting (not, as the Daily Mail imagines, that the Commission should be able to impose its will on Member States). And he is proposing this for practical reasons (to avoid a small insignificant state such as Estonia or Slovenia being able to veto too many decisions when countries from eastern Europe join the EU in a few years time) rather than because he wants to construct a European super-state, still less because he thinks he’s Hitler or Napoleon.

Under these circumstances the only way in which your nightmare scenario could come about would be if the governments of all 15 (soon 25) EU Member States were to agree to setting up a centralised super-state, which in turn, since the governments of all these states depend on commanding a majority in an elected parliament, would imply that this is what a majority of people in all of these states wanted. We don’t buy it. It’s just not a realistic scenario. It’s just a scare story put out by those sections of the capitalist class in Britain who want Britain to depend on America rather than the EU. We are surprised that someone like yourself who has some knowledge of socialist ideas should fall for it.

A change of money-tokens, snail-pace political development towards a united Europe, these are not things to get worked up about. They are just superficial changes in the superstructure of capitalism that leave its basis unchanged. Profits before needs, class privilege and exploitation, these are the things that get us worked up, and why we will not drop our single-minded concentration on advocating socialism in favour of defending the pound or British “sovereignty”. When the referendum on the euro comes, we’ll be advocating that people write “I want world socialism” across the ballot paper or, alternatively, they could go fishing that day to show that they couldn’t care less either way.

Editors.

A former Communist writes

Dear Editors,

As a former Communist, I’ve always felt the SPGB was the political equivalent of Christian fundamentalists who prayed first abstractly for people to change their souls/minds to “end” iniquity –but never advocated anything practical like joining trade unions, voting or taking part in military service. Still a socialist, I still fundamentally disagree with you, but your article on the euro intrigued me with some of its observations.

Twenty-six years ago, at a rally in Hyde Park against EEC entry, I asked a Spartacist what their view was. “It is of no concern to the workers,” he said. “We want a United States of Europe”. “What about the increase in food costs? What about heavier indirect taxation? Doesn’t that concern workers?” “Only marginally.” Reflecting that decimalisation was used as an excuse for a rip-off, I suppose the American Spartacist is now “happier” at the prospect of workers being ripped off .

D. Shepherd, 

London NW4

Reply:

We hold no brief for Trotskyism, and certainly not for the cult known as the “Spartacists”, but the person you met in Hyde Park all those years ago was basically right (rare for a Trotskyist) except that workers should be concerned instead with establishing world socialism rather than a United States of Europe.

The introduction of the euro may well provide an excuse for certain shops to put up prices but they can only do this because the currency is being slowly depreciated due to the government over-issuing it, which means that there’s a tendency for prices to rise slowly all the time, and with them wages. This is why this is “only marginal”. The same goes for higher food prices and higher indirect taxes: in so far as they increase the cost of living they exert an upward pressure on wages, and the best way to deal with them is to press for higher wages, not take sides in arguments between capitalist groupings as to which trading bloc they should join.

We for our part used to compare the now defunct “Communist” Party to the Catholic Church, with its popes and cardinals who decided what the “line” was (what was in the interests of state-capitalist Russia) and then told their followers what to do and think including lies. While it is true that our members took the very practical stand of refusing to do military “service” (i.e. learn to kill fellow workers), it’s a lie that we don’t join trade unions (we do) and that we don’t vote (we do go and vote, but not for any pro-capitalist or reformist candidates).

Editors.

Marx: A globalisation convert?

Dear Editors,

Marx “would be a vocal advocate for globalization”, so stated The Hon. Michael Costa, MP, on 19 September in his maiden speech to the Legislative Council of the New South Wales State Parliament.

Prior to a parliamentary privileged life Costa was an executive union official with the Labor Council of New South Wales. In his maiden speech he referred to the many Labor Council officers who have represented the workers of the state in the Legislative Council, “an institution that served the workers of this state well” (my observation as an elected workplace union delegate is that “conned” would be a more appropriate word than “served”).

Costa, in a seemingly apologetic phrase, disclosed that he was one “who started off in the far left by accident”. No definition of “far left” was given by Costa, though he did refer to “Marxists”. There followed a diatribe on self-styled followers of Marx, etc and so it went on.

I find it amusing that when some politicians enter parliament they have to atone for previous political thoughts. Is the public purge a requisite for being accepted into the Temple of Reform? Nevertheless a bit of political underwear washing never hurt our accident-prone Costa, for in November he was appointed to a ministerial position – Minister for Police.

One of the New Year announcements by Mr Supreme Plod was the news that more prisons are to be built in NSW. One wonders whether prison building is to accommodate unemployed workers, one way or the other.

As to Costa’s informed (?) knowledge of what the resurrected Marx would subscribe to, I quote the offending maiden speech paragraph in full: “I have no doubt that if Marx were alive today he would, given his understanding and interest in economic systems and technological development, support economic policies that promote prosperity and indeed would be a vocal advocate for globalization and in all probability would be a member of the Centre Unity faction of the Labor Party”.

Costa’s litany has no doubt earned him a seat on a multinational company board in his post-parliamentary life. I have no doubt that if Marx were alive today he would never condescend to becoming a company director, even of a cigar factory.

“G. Brunker”, 

Sydney, 

Australia

Russia: Leftists in Dispute (1976)

From the January 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1968 was published an English translation of Ernest Mandel’s monumental work of Trotskyite orthodoxy, Marxist Economic Theory. This was reviewed in International Socialism and led to an exchange of pamphlets between I.S. and Mandel’s supporters in Britain, the International Marxist Group. IMG have republished this controversy with the title Readings on State Capitalism, which has a certain interest for Socialists as discussion centres on the view that Russia is State capitalist.

Mandel, Kidron and Harman (who took over the IS banner half-way through the controversy) agree that Russian society is not Socialist. Mandel, however, maintains that Russia is a very degenerate workers’ state, which has begun a transition towards Socialism with an economy “marked by the contradictory combination of a non-capitalist mode of production and a still basically bourgeois mode of distribution”. A capitalist mode of distribution on the basis of a non-capitalist mode of production is not only contradictory but, from a Marxist point of view, an absurdity; for it is the mode of production which in the end determines the character of all other aspects of society, including the mode of distribution (i.e. the way the social product is divided).

Kidron and Harman describe Russia now as state capitalist, but think that “Russia in the 10 years after 1917 . . . was not itself capitalist”. What then was it?

Discussion about the nature of Russian society is discussion about the meaning of both capitalism and socialism, and Mandel has well grasped the nature of Socialism as a moneyless, wageless, stateless society, with the “free distribution of goods and services”, existing on a world scale: “Socialism means a classless society. It therefore presupposes not only the suppression of private property of the means of production, henceforth managed in a planned way by the associate producers themselves, but it also calls for a level of development of the productive forces which makes possible the withering away of commodity production; of money, and of the state”.

Kidron, on the other hand, describes “socialism” vaguely as “workers’ control of production”, with the implication that this could be control of the production of commodities.

So we have Mandel denying Socialism properly, but saying that a world Socialist revolution is an impossibility and that instead the working class of each country should aim at establishing “a society in transition from capitalism to socialism”, based on nationalization under workers’ control; and we have Kidron saying correctly that no transitional society between capitalism and Socialism is possible (“socialism is a total system; it cannot grow piecemeal within the interstices of a capitalist society”), but defining Socialism wrongly and meaning by it precisely the same as Mandel’s impossible “transitional society”!

If Mandel were claiming that Russia cannot be described as capitalist, but some new form of exploitative society, then his argument would be stronger. But he is claiming that Russian society is better and more progressive than what exists in the West: basically a society which workers should support. This is dangerous nonsense. To suggest that Russia, where trade-union rights like strike action and democratic rights available in the west are denied, offers a precedent for future working-class development, is to mock the sufferings of the working class there.

But the main reason for saying that Russia is capitalist is the existence of the wages system there. As Marx pointed out, wage-labour and capital presuppose each other. Wage-labourers produce value, some of which returns to them in the form of wages, the rest going to those who monopolise the means of production as surplus value; this surplus value is re-invested in production and so becomes capital, wealth invested in production with a view to profit.

That capital accumulation out of the surplus value produced by wage-labour has never ceased in Russia since 1917 should be obvious enough, but Mandel puts forward the view that what has governed production in Russia has been “the consumption desires of the bureaucracy”. He paints Russia as a society where usurpers (the bureaucracy) have come to power and live off the workers who continue to produce under non-exploitative conditions. Mandel actually says that Russian workers, though paid wages, are not exploited at the point of production as in the West; but that they are robbed as consumers by a “parasitic and pilfering” bureaucracy

Mandel says the IS view is essentially a Menshevik one. According to Mandel the Mensheviks held that “a socialist revolution in a backward country is impossible and that whatever you do, capitalism, and only capitalism, can flower there,” and that “whatever one did, capitalism was on the agenda in that country (as long as it would not have been overthrown in all or most of the industrially advanced countries of the world)”. The Mensheviks may have held these views, but the fact remains that it is an analysis and in accordance with the Marxian materialist conception of history. Socialism can only be established on a world scale and on the basis of an advanced industrial economy; in the absence of the Socialist revolution all that can develop in so-called backward countries is capitalism.

We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain have always been logical on this point. Yes, we reply; Russia is state-capitalist and, yes, the Russian revolution was not a Socialist revolution, but a seizure of power by a political party which later came to form the nucleus of a new state-capitalist ruling class. This was inevitable, given the absence at the time of Socialist consciousness amongst the majority of the workers of the world. This is what we said at the time and subsequent developments in Russia have proved the soundness of the Socialist Party’s analysis.

Adam Buick

Inside the Bolshevik Cul-de-sac (1970)

From the April 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

State Capitalism or not?
Those who still cling to the basic Bolshevik premise — that the Russian insurrection of October 1917 amounted to a Socialist revolution — are caught inside a trap of their own making. Whichever way they turn, they are landed with an uneasy antagonism between their theory and reality.

Those who faithfully follow Moscow, claiming that Russia today is Socialist, are in a ludicrous position, now that more information is available about Russia, and now that Russia is catching up with the West economically, so that East and West grow daily more similar. Therefore the British “Communist” Party is in catastrophic decline, its membership dwindling and ageing, brandishing their confusion now for all to see.

The Maoists, who assert that Russia has only recently become capitalist, are also in a fix. For it is difficult to believe that the changes in Russia’s economy since the death of Stalin are so profound as to amount to a change from Socialism to capitalism (terms which, though definitions vary, are universally held to describe diametrically opposed systems). It is also difficult to see any fundamental differences in the Russian and Chinese economies, except that China is more primitive and less centrally-directed.

Then, of course, our old friends the Trotskyists are still with us. After a bitter struggle between Stalin and Trotsky over which of them should have the privilege of directing the exploitation of the Russian workers, Stalin won. Trotsky became a fierce critic of the Stalin regime, yet he would still not admit that Russia was capitalist — which would have put a question mark over his own revolutionary career. But it wasn’t Socialist either. Instead, he came up with the formula that Russia was a “degenerated workers’ state,” basically a transitional society between capitalism and Socialism, with lots of deformities.

In practice this meant that Trotskyists always defended the Russian state against other capitalist powers, whilst at the same time criticising some of its “deformities.”

Trotsky and his followers took the view that Russia could not be described as capitalist because the bulk of Russian industry was nationalised. Overall state control, they said, was an advance on capitalism. Bolsheviks have always thought that state ownership was a step in the direction of Socialism, and have sometimes suggested that Socialism itself would be a form of state ownership.

There has long been confusion within Bolshevism on this point. Bogdanov’s Short Course of Economic Science (used by the Bolshevik government) as well as The ABC of Communism (written by two leading Bolsheviks in 1919), followed Marx and Engels in characterising Socialism or Communism as a wageless, moneyless society, and emphasising that mere nationalisation or “state socialism” really contained “no trace of Socialism.” After all, the Bolsheviks have always claimed to be Marxists.

Yet in 1917 Lenin had introduced a distinction between “Socialism” and “Communism,” which till that time all Marxists had given precisely interchangeable meanings. He also produced his famous definition of Socialism as “nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people.”

In the 1970s, nationalisation is not the thrilling issue it once was. State ownership has grown in all the western countries, and it has been brought emphatically home to the great majority of workers everywhere that being employed by the state is in no way better than being employed by a private corporation. It is not even very different. And in Russia, the extreme of centralised direction reached under Stalin is widely seen to have been merely a phase of development, now a positive hindrance to further advancement.

As a result of this it has been borne in upon many radicals and left-wingers that Russia is state capitalist. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, once almost alone in taking this view, and heartily ridiculed for it, now finds itself in numerous company. Be warned. The “sectarianism” of today is the truism of tomorrow!

The IS Group
However most of the people who have recently come round to the view that Russia is capitalist have not adjusted all of their political views accordingly, but have merely corrected this one point, failing to notice the inconsistencies which then emerge in the remainder of their ideas. For example the group known as International Socialism (IS) is basically a Trotskyist group except that it holds Russia to be state capitalist.

The growth of working-class understanding is a contradictory process. With their emphasis on violence and minority action IS are peddling dangerous deceptions. Yet these are more advanced deceptions than those marketed by the “Communist” Party 20 years ago — more advanced in the sense that they recognise the impracticability these days of equating nationalisation and Russia with Socialism. True, the incorporation of the correct view that modern Russia is capitalist into the fundamentally mistaken and anti-working-class doctrine of Bolshevism, allows this doctrine to gain greatly in immediate appeal. But only at the expense of yet more glaring inconsistencies within the doctrine itself. For instance, the IS claim that capitalism sprang into being in Russia in 1928 after 10 years of transition towards Socialism is breathtaking in its lack of connection with any kind of reality. (1)

Even the Bolshevik leaders (with the exceptions, interestingly enough, of Trotsky and Stalin), conceded that state capitalism existed in Russia following 1917.

Kidron and Mandel
There has recently been a controversy (2) between Michael Kidron (IS) and Ernest Mandel (orthodox Trotskyist) which is interesting to Socialists since it shows Kidron failing to draw reasonable conclusions from his view that Russia is capitalist (in fact failing to fully understand what this means), and Mandel taking advantage of Kidron’s confusion to discredit the whole theory of state capitalism.

Mandel points out that if they were consistent, IS would adopt a position of hostility towards the “Communist” movement. If North Vietnam is state capitalist, how can IS support the Vietcong? If the “Communist” parties are capitalist parties, the potential nuclei of future ruling classes, and if these ruling classes would not be historically progressive, why do IS cooperate politically with them? Mandel might well ask.

Of course, he regards such a position of hostility as unthinkable. But this is precisely the standpoint of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have at no time combined with the “Communist” Party or ceased to expose it, and we have always adopted a policy of opposition to both sides in every capitalist war. Unlike IS, we unite theory and practice.

In order to combat Mandel’s argument that Russia is a “transitional society,” Kidron says that there can be no transitional society between capitalism and Socialism. Quite correctly, he states: “The only possible transition is a sudden, revolutionary one.” This promising statement (astonishing coming from IS) is somewhat undermined by the fact that Kidron hasn’t the foggiest clue what Socialism is:

  Socialism is a total system. It cannot grow piecemeal within the interstices of a capitalist society. How does workers’ control of production coexist with control by a ruling class when the means of production in dispute are one and the same? How does self-determination and consumer sovereignty (‘production for use’) coexist with the external compulsion and blind accumulation that results from capitalist dispersal?

This is one of several instances where Mandel (who has read Marx) has a field day demolishing Kidron (a mere Keynesian-eclectic mouthing misunderstood Marxist phrases). Socialism, of course, has nothing to do with “workers’ control of production.” Socialism means a classless world society, without commodities, without the state, without frontiers. It is therefore interesting to note that Mandel realises what Socialism is, but relegates it to the distant beyond, whereas Kidron wants “Socialism” as quickly as possible, but his “Socialism” isn’t Socialism at all! Mandel’s “transitional society” is basically similar to Kidron’s “Socialism,” and both are actually models of capitalism, since both envisage the retention of the wages system.

Marx argued that wage-labour and capital were quite inseparable. And in a reply to Mandel, C. Harman of IS comments:

  Nowhere … is there a single mention of the working class or a single reference to the wage labour/capital relationship. Now this is curious. For it was not Michael Kidron but Karl Marx who wrote ‘The relation between wage labour and capital determines the entire character of the mode of production.’ And this is not an accidental aside . . .

But later we find Harman flatly contradicting this, as he must because wage-labour is to remain a feature of the “workers’ state” which is the avowed aim of IS. Harman argues that Russian industry from 1917 to 1928 was not capitalist, though presumably he would not deny that it featured wage-labour.

Neither Mandel nor Kidron seem unduly aware of modern Russian realities. Both seem to believe the Russian economy is “planned” full stop.

What then, is the situation of the Russian worker? He is free to move from factory to factory, from town to town, or occupation to occupation, in pursuit of higher wages, or under pressure of unemployment. And he is forced to do so, since he owns no means of production (except a substantial but dwindling number who have small plots of land, and indeed, need them to keep starvation at bay). He is therefore “doubly free” in Marx’s phrase. He sells his labour-power to a state enterprise for a wage which is less than the price of his product. The surplus is mostly reinvested for his further exploitation, with a small proportion going to keep his rulers in the manner to which they are accustomed. In any circumstances (except general forced labour) it would be quite impracticable for the state to plan wages with any accuracy, but this is impossible in Russia where most workers are on piece rates (described by Marx as “the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production”). It has been a pretty constant feature of Russian state capitalism that the actual total wages bill has exceeded (sometimes vastly) the amount foreseen by the plan. In Russia, labour power is clearly a commodity.

A popular view of the Russian economy is that a plan is devised at the top, orders are issued, and enterprises promptly fulfil the plan. The goals of the plan are, first, making an overall profit, second, catching up with the West. Yet to possess any effectiveness at all, the plan must be based on reports from the enterprises, which as well as being concerned to fulfil plans, also have their own profit and loss account, with plenty of incentive to get their profits up.

In fact, the long-term (five-year and seven-year) plans are always drastically modified in practice. They are merely guidelines for the annual (and quarterly and monthly) plans. Even so, several of the long-term plans could not be decreed until long after they were supposed to have started, and one (the sixth five-year plan) had to be abandoned altogether.

In the process of adapting the long-term plan year by year, all sorts of unforeseen factors have to be taken into account, many of which are even by Mandel’s account, unambiguously the products of market forces. Much of the Russian state’s “planning” is thus a matter of anticipating, or even subsequently conforming to, these market forces. It is, however, true that they can exercise considerably “arbitrary” influences. Any capitalist state can do this to some extent (development grants, SET, etc.). The Russian state has much more power, mainly because, with the state monopoly of foreign trade functioning as a protective tariff, and with prevailing internal scarcity, the Russian capitalists have a seller’s market. In relation to the peasants they have a buyer’s market. It is exactly in such monopolistic situations that commodities can sell consistently above or below their values. (3)

But what happens as the disappearing peasant reserve strengthens the workers’ bargaining power? As consumer goods production is increased to raise the workers’ productivity? As consumers (workers and capitalists) get greater choice in their purchases, so that enterprises must become more responsive to the market, hence freer of central direction? What happens as the era of telescope development passes, so that Russian industry must imitate less and innovate more? The Russian capitalists are compelled to abandon by degrees the system of planning with material targets, which served them well as a method of rapid industrialisation, but has now outlived its usefulness.

There are many defenders of western capitalism who assert chat “Socialism” has failed in Russia, which is therefore “returning” to capitalism. Mandel plays into the hands of these people by describing the current decentralisation of profit-seeking initiative as “degeneration” when it is clearly necessitated by advancement. He also thereby gives ammunition to those who argue that “Socialism” is suitable only for backward countries.

What has failed in Russia is not “planning”, much less Socialism, but the attempt to plan a capitalist economy. It is not impossible to operate a technologically advanced society according to a common plan, but it is quite impossible to do this if there are competing economic interests, and if all those working for the plan have to be provided with a monetary incentive for everything they do. In a Socialist economy, with all work entirely voluntary and the price system abolished, it will be entirely feasible to plan all production according to democratically decided criteria.

Between capitalism and Socialism there cannot exist a stable, lengthy transitional period. This point seemed to have dimly penetrated the brain of Trotsky, who recognised the silliness of a “transitional” society which stably maintained itself for generation after generation. He therefore described Stalin’s regime as a pyramid balanced on its head, and predicted it would be toppled in a major war. When the war came, it demonstrated the Russian system to be rather a pyramid stood firmly on its base. (4)

Far from Russia being on the road to Socialism, workers there still have to win the elementary political and trade union rights already gained by western workers. Capitalism continues to exist throughout the world because workers put up with it, and can be abolished as soon as the majority of workers desire Socialism, though this is most strikingly evident in countries which, unlike Russia, have effective workers’ suffrage. It is therefore quite wrong to believe, as Mandel does, that we should support Russia or China against America. It is not worth a single worker’s life or limbs to advance the interests of the Russian rulers against their rivals. Neither does it matter whether Russian enterprises remain formally, legally state-owned or not. This has no bearing on workers’ interests and is beside the point anyway— a nationalised industry can be as free from de facto central control as some “privately-owned” firms.

Mandel’s view would have slightly more plausibility if all his “transitional societies” were politically united under one state. But they compete economically and militarily, and if the whole world were owned by them alone, the danger of our species being exterminated in a war would be no less than it is today—”transitional” indeed!

Russia must of course be seen in its international context. It is here that the IS arguments against Mandel are strongest. As Harman rightly says, there is no such thing as the “inner logic” of a plan. The goals of Russian national planning have been fixed by international competition.

But the force of the IS attack here only throws into more startling relief their .position on the national question (especially now that they have taken-to-supporting, not only the Vietcong, but also the Chinese state which they admit to be capitalist). It is no get-out to proclaim, as Harman does, that they also supported the Kenyan anti-colonial movement, or “the Cypriot struggle led by the cleric Makarios and the fascist Grivas.” That is nothing to be proud of. Neither is this justified by calling it “the Marxist position.” What conceivable excuse can there be for people who claim to be Socialists supporting the slaughter of workers which is a side-effect of the rival capitalist powers’ perennial jostling for a place in the sun?

Steele.

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1 In case the point is missed, this is not only an exercise in labelling the past. So long as IS maintain that the 1917 revolution was Socialist they will be unable to seriously criticise all the garbage that comes in its train, Lenin’s ignorant theory of Imperialism; the concept of the vanguard party and “transitional demands,” etc. So long as they fail to do this, they are an obstacle to the establishment of Socialism.

2 Kidron in International Socialism 36; Mandel’s pamphlet The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism; Debate between Kidron and Mandel at Hull University, 4/11/69; Harman in International Socialism 41.

3 If Mandel’s reasoning were correct, and Russia lacked some of the essential features of capitalism, this would show not that it was transitional between capitalism and Socialism, but “transitional” between Asiatic feudalism (tsarism) and capitalism. The peculiarities of Russian capitalism are the outcome of an unprecedented combination of backward peasant production and advanced industry.

4 It is revealing that Mandel doesn’t dare use Trotsky’s long-since shattered argument that a state bureaucracy cannot constitute a ruling class. Trotsky was prepared to concede that state capitalism could in theory exist provided there was individual ownership of shares in the state.