J. A. Dawson and the Socialist Party of Australia: A reply to Thesis Eleven (1986)

From the Winter 1986-7 issue of the World Socialist

The first issue of Thesis Eleven, published in 1980 by a group of academics from Monash University, Victoria, carried an article by Steven Wright on "Left Communism in Australia: J.A. Dawson and the 'Southern Advocate for Workers Councils'". Since Dawson was for a period a member of the Socialist Party of Australia (now called the World Socialist Party of Australia after the original name was usurped by a break-away from the Australian Communist Party in the 1960s) and since Wright used this as a pretext to criticise our principles and policy, a member of the World Socialist Party who was acquainted from first-hand experience with the historical events discussed by Wright sent in an earlier version of the following article as a reply. As it was not accepted for publication we must assume that the editors of Thesis Eleven are merely interested in interpreting the world in the course of academic discussions amongst themselves.

"You rightly consider yourself as a herald of uncompromising fight and clear opposition to capitalism, enabled to do that by clear understanding of capitalism and Marxian science". The writer of these words was Anton Pannekoek, who had been a prominent theoretician of the Second International and was later a leading exponent of Workers Council Communism as a system of society based on workers' control of industry. Pannekoek's words were addressed to Jim Dawson, an active political propagandist in Australia during the first half of this century.

In an article in Thesis Eleven, a publication announcing itself as "a new journal working at the crossroads of socialism and scholarship", the editors made way for an article on Dawson by Steven Wright. One of Wright's major objects in dogging Dawson's political peregrinations was to attack the Socialist Party of Australia and its companion party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Wright steps off on the Dawson trail, saying:

The beginning of the second half of the 1940s, in the wake of the military defeat of fascism, marked a time of resurgence of working class struggle in Europe and America, a wave whose crest the left seemed to be riding everywhere, much to the consternation of both Washington and Moscow. This was the time of victorious Labor governments in Australia, of the Australian Communist Party's peak in membership, of Labour MPs standing in their seats in the House of Commons to defiantly sing 'The Red Flag', and of partisans, Soviet tanks and 'Socialist Unity' parties in Eastern Europe.

Whatever significance this "resurgence" had for the working class, it was certainly no indication of increased actual socialist understanding on the part of the workers.

The rise to power of Labor governments was no new phenomenon in Australian political history and the sordid records of such governments in the second half of the 1940s was merely a repeat of past history, the second half of the 1940s was merely a repeat of past history. The "Australian Communist Party's peak in membership" was merely a reflex of the influx of numerous fellow travellers who had been attracted to the CP after the belated entry of Russia into World War II. Together, the Labor Party and the Communist Party had hopped on the Tour de Triomphe of the Red Army on the Eastern Front While triumphantly proclaiming the "defeat of Fascism" (German variety) the Labor Party pledged support for the Red Fascists — Stalin and Co. The degrading and hypocritical spectacle of British Labour MPs singing the Red Flag in the House of Commons was a miserable vote-catching stunt.

As we claimed at the time, the mushrooming "socialist" and "communist" parties were all part of the Soviet con-game, directed towards trapping unwitting workers into the ranks of Soviet supporters. The only significant feature of the Wright-styled "resurgence" was the willingness of the politically ignorant workers to fall for the political bunk pedalled by self-appointed leaders who were impatiently preening themselves for the romantic roles which they visualised they were to play in what they regarded as the impending world revolution.

What really happened in Russia 

It was merely history repeating itself — a replica of the aftermath of the first world war, with the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, when the self-appointed workers' leaders of the day were lining up for the favours of the Kremlin. Numerous outfits, lefts, rights, centre, and others, sought handouts from the Kremlin coffers, including trips to Moscow with all mod-cons, while battening on the credulity of those they regarded as sheep to be led. Ample proof of this to be found in the belated admissions of these "ambassadors" to Moscow, some of whom were later relegated to "lower mass work" and resigned, while others were unceremoniously kicked out because they offended the local commissars.

One of the few organisations which understood what was really happening in Russia was the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties in the rest of the world, including the Socialist Party of Australia (which had been founded in Melbourne on 22 January 1924). Unlike our critics and adversaries, we did not wait for fifty years after the Russian Revolution to realise that it was impossible to establish socialism in the immature social, economic and industrial state of Russia. We based our analysis of the situation in accordance with the scientific theories of Karl Marx. Subsequent developments in Russia, China and their satellites vindicated our position.

Still, we can't keep that Wright man down. He pops up again with the old jargon:

October 1917 changed that irrevocably. The new star in the East rendered obsolete the time-honoured charts by which revolutionaries had previously navigated the path to socialism . . . The SPGB was simply left behind From being one among many small socialist sects in Britain, the SPGB found itself standing haughtily out in the cold, watching the rest of the far left fight amongst themselves for official recognition from the Communist International.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain was not left "out in the cold"; it had never been in the hot romantic furnace of the Moscow pseudo-revolutionaries. Nor had it been involved in the frantic fight for recognition by the Kremlin. Hence it did not have to suffer the frustrations of those who saw their former comrades liquidated by the very bureaucratic dictatorship they had, in their stupidity, helped to create.

Furthering flaunting his bias against the Socialist Party, Wright asserts:

. . . the Socialist Party of Great Britain sometimes gave the distinct impression of wishing that the October Revolution had never taken place.

By this he has in mind our strongly-held view that the Russian Revolution helped put the clock back as far as the development of the socialist movement in the West was concerned. But far from wishing that the revolution had never taken place, we said that a capitalist revolution was inevitable in Russia because the material conditions were not there on which to establish a socialist revolution.

Notwithstanding the ridiculous apologetics from Lenin and his supporters, we were proved to be correct when Lenin, with the backing of the bureaucracy, introduced the New Economic Policy. Announcing NEP, Lenin admitted that it was "a step back to capitalism". Actually, except in name the dictatorship had never been in any way socialist

Other superficial changes in nomenclature were introduced in place of the long-recognised definitions used by Marx. These have been recognised and are too widely known to be set out here, but we might mention two: the substitution of "surplus product" in lieu of "surplus value" and the deliberate falsification of one of Marx's most well-known aphorisms "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" into "from each according to their ability, to each according to their work" (our emphasis). In this falsified version it became the key for the Soviet classification which cleared the way for piecework, "socialist competition", subotniks and the Stakhanovites who were used to con their fellow workers in the speed-up gangs. Then there came the "Heroes of the Soviet Republic" who, like the Chief Commissars and the military leaders, carried more decorations on their chests than could be found on a Christmas cake.

All these measures have vindicated our attitude, but Wright castigates the Socialist Parties for telling the truth about the lamentable history of the Russian dictatorship and those who supported or apologised for it.

The Dawson enigma

One of those who had been associated with these disappointing ventures was Jim Dawson, the subject of Wright's political and industrial biography.

On Dawson's own testimony he had been through numerous organisations before seeking salvation for a while in the Socialist Party of Australia. Starting off in Britain he was taken in by the "Clarion Socialism" of Blatchford; then he turned to the Single Tax theories of Henry George. Returning to Australia he voted and propagated for the Australian Labor Party. On the outbreak of World War I, he opposed it in accordance with his Christian ethics which he was taught as a child.

After hearing their speakers he joined the Industrial Workers of the World. By mistake he enlisted in the Detroit IWW Club and became hostile to the real IWW. Later, he found his way into the Socialist Labor Party, explaining to Paul Mattick, a well-known US radical, that his reason for doing so was "on account of their 'Plan' — the average worker 'wants' something in the nature of a blue-print".

Once again divesting himself of his previous political and industrial garments, he adopted the garb of the Australian Socialist Party. At that time the ASP had joined the scramble for recognition by the Kremlin during the early years of the Russian dictatorship. However, they were out-manoeuvred by what became the Australian handmaid of Moscow, the Australian Communist Party. This comprised disgruntled ALP members, One Big Union advocates, ex-IWW remnants and other non-socialist opportunists, all led by Jock Garden, secretary of the Sydney Trades and Labor Council.

Referring to these events in 1946, Dawson said:

The Russian Revolution of 1917 burst upon us like an atomic bomb. We went crazy about it. I wrote it up in lengthy articles in the International Socialist (Sydney organ of the ASP) and like most zealots distorted the facts to fit in with our theoretical yearnings (our emphasis).

Dawson then made another switch. He returned to the Detroit IWW, which by then had become the Workers International Industrial Union, and edited its journal the OBU Herald. Later he discarded this outfit accusing it of "sectarianism", a term adopted by the Australian Workers Union which at that time was considered to be the biggest union body-snatcher in Australia because it stood over members of other unions forcing its victims to pay levies to the Labor Party irrespective of what their political leanings were. It was a case of "no ALP levy coupon, no job".

Bad health kept him out of active participation for a time. In the early years of World War II, he set up his Workers' Literature Bureau, stating his reasons for this was to offset the flood of Stalinism by spreading the views of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. At this point Wright finds another excuse for his unsupported attacks on the SPGB, beginning with the caption "Principles First — The Small Party of Good Boys" and continuing:

Of all the schools of revolutionary thought toward which Jim Dawson was drawn in the 1940s, the Socialist Party of Great Britain was undoubtedly the most peripheral. Despite boasting a higher membership than previously by the end of the decade, the SPGB commanded a smaller audience within the labour movement than on the eve of the Russian Revolution thirty years before.

Seeing that the so-called labour movement was always hostile to the Socialist Party, what significance is there in this subtle charge? Fluctuations are common in most organisations, political or industrial. But when Wright uses numbers as a criterion of truth or sincerity he thereby adopts the sneer of the large political parties throughout the world which contain hugh majorities of unenlightened adherents.

By this time Wright is beginning to analyse the Dawson enigma, asking "what had led Dawson to join the Socialist Party of Australia in the first place?". According to Wright,

What attracted Dawson most to the Socialist Party was its vision of a 'genuine' socialism free from such Stalinist distortions, a society 'based upon the common ownership and democratic control' of the means of production and distribution.

Dawson himself had already provided this answer. Having read about the SPGB attitude towards Russia, he found himself in agreement with it Quoting an article from the Western Socialist (official organ of the Workers — later World — Socialist Party of the US) which had pointed out that "the wage system still prevails in Russia", Dawson said:

the exploitation being no different there than in any capitalist society. That is sufficient for us. The existence of a wage system indicated clearly that neither socialism or communism prevails. The wages system, no matter what form it takes, indicates that capitalism exists.

Wright himself then quotes an article written by the present writer that appeared in the Socialist Comment (official organ of the Socialist Party of Australia) at that time:

If the people of Russia own and control the instruments for producing and distributing wealth, why do they pay themselves wages to buy back from themselves the things which already belong to them?

Having acquired this knowledge from the SPGB's Object and Principles Dawson discarded it. Claiming that the Socialist Party of Australia was loath to fulfil the role he expected from it he decided to shoulder the job himself and set up his own propaganda concern. After his wide experience in almost every organisation available to him, Dawson could never understand why a socialist party, based on Marxist principles, could not compromise those principles.

In effect Dawson sought to seduce an impoverished party with his personal wealth. But the Socialist Party of Australia always safeguarded its socialist integrity by refusing to accept donations with strings attached. We had seen too many so-called socialist parties slither down the opportunist path after their wealthy self-seeking patrons demanded the conditions tied in with their apparent benevolence. SPA finances were — and are — controlled democratically by the party, that is by the members themselves.

Dawson could never understand that; it didn't suit him. It does help, however, to understand his disappointment at being denied his paternalistic and condescending offer to become a socialist sugar daddy. It also throws light on this pique at our refusal to cooperate with him after he left the party. Wright seems to have missed these points.

See the blogger's note at the end of the article.

Socialist activity in Melbourne

Trying to further explain Dawson's peregrinations, Wright takes another slam at the Socialist Party of Great Britain, accusing it of championing "a 'pure' parliamentary road to Socialism" that was anathema to the "outside left". Revealing no understanding of the Socialist Party attitude towards the machinery of government he says:

. . . the SPA and SPGB called upon workers to vote into government representatives 'whose sole business will be to abolish capitalism and introduce socialism' . . . What this meant practically was that, apart from at election times, the Socialist Parties refused to dirty their hands with the real world, concentrating instead on weekly classes designed to clarify the participants' grasp of the Socialist program, or public debates where every opportunity was taken to 'prove the case for socialism' through the forcefulness of the argument, and where necessary humiliation of the opponent.

In other words, Wright claims that educating workers in socialist theory is not participating in the real world.

When we contested elections, as socialists we told the workers that if they didn't want socialism we didn't want their vote. At elections where we had no candidate we urged socialists to write "Socialism" across their ballot paper. For the Victoria State election of 1945 Dawson wanted to abandon this position and give support to a non-socialist candidate.

The candidate in question, Jim Coull, who had at one time been a member of the Socialist Party of Australia, was standing as a "communist-socialist" candidate. An official of the Liquor Trades Union he, along with the rest of his Communist and Labor supporters had jumped on the "people's war" (as the war became for them after the German invasion of Russia in 1941) bandwagon and had been rushing around the country boosting war bonds. Incidentally, as the government had exempted union officials from military service, these latter fought the war at their firesides, urging workers to defeat the Nazis and that when "we" had done that "there would be a brand new world" for mugs. Coull had become one of Dawson's darlings and Dawson gave him every support during the election.

Wright says that Coull "performed impressively" in receiving 3514 votes. But he does not mention (perhaps he never knew) that an SPA candidate standing in the same constituency before the war, in 1934, had polled 12,173 votes [see the blogger's note at the end of the article] and against a much stronger opponent in the person of Jack Holloway, head of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council who had defeated the Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce, at the previous election. And during the election the "communist comrades" dubbed us "social fascists".

Now, let us look closer at the picture: Coull lost his deposit, we polled more than the "half-pie communist" whose showing Wright calls "impressive". What price numbers after that? Most irrelevant, one might say.

Over the years the Melbourne branch of the Socialist Party of Australia had been conducting open-air meetings on street corners in Elsternwick, Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, Albert Park (we just about founded the Red Square there), Brunswick, Newport and Williamstown. On Sundays we held meetings on the Yarra Bank, lectures in the city on Sunday evenings, classes on economics, industrial history and other kindred subjects, speakers classes, all based on teaching workers Marxist history and philosophy.

We never claimed to be supermen and the work fell on a limited number of workers. Some were class leaders, others lecturers, some good at debating, and there was a regular number of the Jimmy Higgins type who sold the literature, arranged meetings, carried the platform, and all contributed to the work of the party to the best of their ability.

All our meetings, business and propaganda, were open to the public — we had no secrets, no air of conspiracy and, chief of all, there were no leaders. When people know what they want and where they are going, they don't need leaders. To get socialism, the working class must understand what it is all about. The activity of the Socialist Party of Australia was directed towards this end. Can Wright suggest any other way?

We were always willing to meet our opponents but we could not meet them all; we regret that we could not accommodate Wright's choice of opponent, namely Dawson. Wright demands more. He complains that we allowed only accredited speakers to address our audiences or in debate. We had no mere spouters. We selected representatives who knew and understood the socialist position on many subjects. Our representatives had to be well-versed in their subjects. We could not depute a novice to tackle skilled anti-socialist opponents, including MPs, leading Communist Party speakers, Labor politicians and university professors.

But Wright says that we disdained to get our hands dirty in a world known only to him. What sheer effrontery!

Knowledge is power

Why Wright should constantly criticise the Socialist Party of Australia on its policy of insisting on Marxian education, it is hard to understand. One striking feature of the pseudo-communist and socialist organisations is their muddled politics. This is reflected in the lack of understanding in their rank and file of the import of the policies put forward by the upper echelon.

Constant pandering to ignorant political prejudice to obtain support from any quarter can never bring success to any real socialist party. Nor will it ever, in the long run, bring support to those who practise it. Sooner or later some of their members will wake up. In any case, as all such parties are aspiring to run the capitalist system, it is always the capitalists who win. All the non-socialist parties are reformist and their reforms can never bring success to the cause of socialism. Whatever the result, it is always the worker supporters who suffer the backlash. The more sincere the well-meaning members of these parties are, the more they suffer for the sins of their treacherous "leaders".

Wright himself seems to be infected with the old IWW slogans "Put the Boss in Overalls", "Smash the Ballot Box with an Axe", "Sabotage", etc, to which the boss class responded with the all-powerful reply "Put the Lot in Jail", much to the chagrin of the well-intentioned but misguided followers in the rank and file. The majority of the IWW officials in Australia, together with their rank and file followers, finished up in the Labor Party or in one of the various so-called communist parties. Many of the rank and file suffered for the whims of their inconsistent leaders.

When he criticises the Socialist Parties for their insistence on socialist understanding on the part of ordinary workers Wright decries the one important safeguard against their being misled by "leaders". He twits when we say "Knowledge is Power". When we use this phrase we equate it with socialist understanding. And an understanding of the capitalist system and how to get rid of it is the greatest power that the working class can possess. As Marx said, "Knowledge, too, is a force". And the knowledge of the need for socialism is the greatest force the working class can acquire in their struggle to abolish capitalism.

Bill Clarke (Australia)

Blogger's Note:

". . . that an SPA candidate standing in the same constituency before the war, in 1934, had polled 12,173 votes"

It has to be pointed out here that the Socialist Party of Australia candidate, W. J. Clarke, did not receive 12, 173 votes at the 1934 election. He polled a [still impressive] 3,872 votes at that election. 

In the above article, the votes of The Socialist Party of Australia  and that of the United Australia Party candidate have been switched around. The correct result is recorded on the wiki page for the Melbourne Ports parliamentary constituency, and the correct result is also recorded in this article from the April 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard.  I can only surmise that this misinformation in the article was a genuine mistake by a man in his 80s, who had misremembered the result of the election contest in 1934.

Bill Clarke's obituary appeared in the September 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard issue of the Socialist Standard. It's worth reading. He was a remarkable man.

Letter: Soviets and Socialists (1975)

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

Soviets and Socialists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cicely Joyce 

London N.10

Reply:

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

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

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

Soviets cannot establish Socialism

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

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

However, control of the state machine is necessary

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

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

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

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

Editors.

Old Fallacies — A Look at the International Communist Current

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The organization called International Communist Current is a mixture of perceptiveness towards some aspects of capitalism, blindness to others, and a belief in long-exposed fallacies. It recognizes that nationalization is state capitalism, that the so-called national liberation movements are anti-socialist and that Russia, China, Cuba, etc. are “just so many capitalist bastions” — “There are no socialist countries on this planet”.

ICC claims to be Marxist but shows no appreciation of Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s economic laws. Politically it belongs to the early 19th-century world of Louis Blanqui (originator of ICC’s slogan “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”) and the young and inexperienced Marx and Engels. It rejects the mature Marx’s view of the necessity to gain control of “the machinery of government, including the armed forces”, and offers instead confrontation with the state power and “world civil war” to be waged by “armed workers’ councils” (see ICC pamphlet Nation or Class).

A basic difficulty about establishing Socialism is that such a social system, involving as it does the disappearance of buying and selling, wages and prices, and the coercive state, could only be operated if the mass of the population understood and wanted it and were ready to accept all the new responsibilities of voluntary co-operation that would rest on them. If the working class as they are at present, most of them attached to capitalism, preoccupied with wages and prices, wage differentials and trade-union demarcation lines, and dependent on management direction and trade-union leadership, were suddenly faced with Socialism there would be chaos and no alternative but to return to capitalism.

Two solutions were offered. One was the Blanquist and early Marxist view—a transition period during which the mass of the population would be “educated to Socialism”. This is the ICC policy. The other, the mature Marxist, view was stated by Engels in his 1895 Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France:

“The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses. When it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us.”

And again, referring to France:

“Socialists realize more and more that no durable success is possible unless they win over in advance the great mass of the people, which, in this case, means the peasants. The slow work of propaganda and parliamentary activity are here also recognised as the next task of the party.”

ICC rejects the Marxist idea of socialists gaining control of Parliament on the ground that Parliament is nothing but “mystification of the working class”. Of course defenders of capitalism use Parliament to mislead the working class, just as they use religion, sport and the bogus economic theories of J. M. Keynes. They can do this only because the workers lack socialist understanding—which fact ICC fails to see. It thinks that if non-socialist workers spontaneously throw up workers’ councils these can’t be “mystified”. Experience has shown how wrong ICC is. Lenin, in State and Revolution, complained that his political opponents had

“managed to pollute even the Soviets, after the model of the most despicable middle-class parliamentarians, by turning them into hollow talking shops.”

ICC greatly admire the Workers’ Councils set up in Germany after the first world war. At the Workers’ Councils National Congress in 1918, and again in 1919, they were bamboozled by Social Democratic politicians into voting their support for the Social Democrat Government, which government then sidetracked the Councils and used state forces to crush resistance.

The argument that because the franchise has been used to trick the workers they should not use it was sensibly answered by Marx in the preamble he wrote for the French Workers’ Party. In it, he commended transforming the vote “from a means of duping, which it has been hitherto, into an instrument of emancipation”.

As ICC are not going to wait until there is a socialist majority, they have to find some other spur to working-class action. Like the young Marx and Engels, and like the British Communist Party in the 1930s, they find it in capitalism’s periodic crises and depressions which stir up discontent about unemployment and falling living standards. But, as Engels pointed out in a letter to Bernstein (25th January 1882), when the depression passes and production and employment expand again “returning prosperity also breaks the revolution and lays the basis for the victory of reaction”.

Are depressions permanent?

ICC think they have an answer to this. They say that the present depression is permanent, that it throws up problems the capitalists are impotent to deal with, and that capitalism cannot afford any more concessions to the workers. The great changeover is supposed to have happened in 1914, after which capitalism became “decadent”, ICC evidently does not know that all these themes are almost as old as capitalism itself.

In every one of capitalism’s depressions there have been people, capitalists as well as workers, who have been convinced that it would be permanent. In the “Great Depression” of the last quarter of the 19th century, which lasted for twenty years, it was widely believed. Lord Randolph Churchill, shortly before he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared in 1884: “We are suffering from a depression of trade extending as far back as 1874, ten years of trade depression, and the most hopeful either among our capitalists or our artisans can discover no signs of a revival . . . Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease.”

Even Engels in 1886 temporarily abandoned Marx’s view of crises and announced a theory of “permanent and chronic depression”. Marx’s own view was tersely summed up in his statement: “There are no permanent crises.”

ICC’s example of the supposed impotence of the capitalists to deal with a problem relates to inflation. In International Review No. 10 (page 10) ICC says that “the bourgeoisie” is equally terrified of more inflation and of ending inflation by “restriction of credit”. From which it is evident that ICC does not understand the cause and purpose of inflation, rejects Marx’s demonstration that inflation is the result of excess issue of inconvertible paper currency, and has—like the Labour Party—fallen for the Keynesian nonsense about the supposed consequence of expanding or contracting credit. Inflation, like free trade, is just a way of operating capitalism. It suits some capitalists and not others. Inflation serves the interests of borrowers, including industrial capitalists, who take up loans and repay them later in depreciated currency.

Inflation and Credit

Inflation, at least for a considerable period, also enables many employers to get away with paying reduced real wages. Deflation, on the other hand, suits financial interests and lenders. If and when inflation reaches dangerous levels, or when those who favour deflation get their way, inflation will be curbed or ended as it has been on scores of occasions in the past, in this and other countries.

Marx showed what he thought of the people who held ICC’s superficial view about credit.

“They looked upon the expansion and contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes in the industrial cycle, as their cause.” 

(Capital Vol. 1, p. 695, Kerr edn.)

To show that capitalism is not what it used to be before 1914, ICC points to recent falling production and living standards, and rising unemployment, but this is what has taken place at the beginning of every depression for nearly two hundred years.

Capitalism did indeed change in 1914. As Professor E. H. Carr puts it, up to 1914: “Britain was the pre-eminent Great Power, and the directing centre of the worldwide capitalist economy.” Now the industrial and military centres of power have shifted to New York, Moscow and Brussels; but this has not altered capitalism’s economic laws or introduced a new “decadence”.

ICC’s belief that since 1914 capitalism cannot afford to make concessions to the workers is belied by the facts, and betrays a failure to understand the economics of capitalism. The capitalists (supported by ignorant or servile academics) have always “proved” that they could not afford to concede anything, as for example giving up the twelve-hour working day and the employment of small children: but the concessions have continued since 1914 as before, and particularly since the second world war.

As output per head of the workers increases (a process speeded-up during the present depression) of course the capitalists can afford to let the workers have some of the increase—as ICC will discover when the depression lifts and in the programmes at the next General Election.

Regarding “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, ICC admit that during their prolonged “transition period” the dictatorship will be operating capitalism all over the world (see Nation or Class). They have, however, not seen its implications. How will the dictatorship deal with the next normal capitalist crisis and the strikes that will accompany it? Will they have an “incomes policy”? or suppress the unions?

The peasants are not to be allowed to share in governmental power. What if they seize the land? And what will the ICC dictatorship do when workers, discontented with the effects of capitalism, carry on ICC policy and set up “armed workers’ councils” to fight the dictatorship?

All of ICC’s assumptions about capitalism are wrong; but let us suppose that they are right. Suppose that a minority of workers sets up armed councils all over the world, and suppose (absurd as it is) that they could win against the massive combined armed forces of all the world’s governments, and suppose they succeeded in setting up their world dictatorship—what would have been gained? The problem of winning over the mass of the population before Socialism could be established would still be there, its completion put back a few more years by ICC’s unnecessary and useless war.

Edgar Hardcastle

Blogger's Note:

In the original issue of the October 1977 Socialist Standard, this article had a notice attached below it advertising a cassette tape recording of a recent debate between the ICC and the SPGB. Though the SPGB and the ICC debated each other twice in 1977 - once in Leeds and once at the SPGB's Head Office - my guess is that the advertised recording is of the debate in London between Alan Ward of the ICC and Edgar Hardcastle ('E. Hardy') of the SPGB. That recording of the London debate is available on the SPGB's website at the following link:

Debate with the I.C.C.  – Which way Socialism? 

Debate at Head Office with the International Communist Current; Hardy (SPGB) v. A. Ward (I.C.C.)

Date: 20th August 1977

Letter: Conditions for socialism (2025)

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

Conditions for socialism

Dear Editors,

I am sympathetic to the politics of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and share its aim of a socialist society established by a conscious and democratic working class majority. What follows is written in that spirit, as a contribution to the discussion on how we prepare for such a transformation.

Capitalism cannot transform itself into socialism. That conviction lies at the heart of socialist thinking and aligns with the principle of establishing a system where the means of production are owned and democratically controlled by the community as a whole. Socialism must be the conscious act of a working class armed with knowledge, organisation, and power.

It is often argued that when the working class is ready for socialism it will vote for it. That rests on two essential truths. First, socialism can only be achieved by a large conscious majority acting democratically and intentionally. Second, the existing machinery of parliamentary democracy, limited though it may be, contains within it the possibility for a peaceful and organised transition, provided the working class understands how that machinery works.

Capitalism thrives on keeping the population politically subdued and misinformed. A poorly informed electorate is an easily ruled one. That is why the working class must be educated, not only in the theory of socialism, but also in how decisions are made, how budgets are set, how law functions, and how representatives can be held accountable. Knowing the rules is the first step to changing the game altogether.

Real democracy begins in our communities, workplaces, housing estates, and union halls, places where working people already share their lives and struggles. Those local assemblies could form the foundation of socialist organisation. On that base, regional workers’ councils could coordinate action on health, housing, transport, and workplace democracy. Delegates to such councils would remain at the service of their community, recallable, rotating, and bound by the decisions they carry.

Above these regional councils, a national workers’ convention could bring together delegates answerable to their base, constrained by short terms, public transparency, and salaries no higher than a worker’s wage. Such a structure could make use of the ballot box while grounding representation in a democracy strengthened from below.

This approach does not reject parliamentary activity. Parliamentary work could serve to spread clarity, to win small improvements, and to reinforce struggles beyond the ballot box. Democracy, limited though it may be, can be an instrument of socialist transformation, but only when matched with organised, politically educated working class action.

If capitalism falls, socialism must stand ready. A revolution of words without preparation, or the destruction of the old system without having built the tools to replace it, will only lead to chaos. Education, organisation, clarity of purpose, and collective democratic structures matter as much as any vote.

Capitalist institutions will call this vision naive or impractical. That reveals their fear. They would rather manage anxiety than meet a working class that knows its power, acts together, and understands both the potential and the limits of parliament.

Socialism requires no saviours. It requires citizens who understand how power works, believe in collective solutions, and organise from the ground up. This is not a utopian fantasy. This is the practical road to a democratic and equitable society.

Pablo Wilcox

Reply:

We agree. Obviously, socialism cannot be introduced by a simple parliamentary vote. It requires, as you put it, ‘a large conscious majority acting democratically and intentionally’ and, also, organised outside parliament in the sort of ways you outline. We would add that, to win control of political power, it will also require a mass socialist party, organised in the same sort of democratic way and without leaders, to contest elections and send mandated delegates to the parliament and regional and local councils. The socialist majority needs to win control of political power to take it out of the hands of those who control it on behalf of the capitalist class and to use it to end their ownership of the resources on which society depends. This has to be done before current problems can be solved in an effective and lasting way.

Three different situations need to be distinguished: (1) what exists today when only a relatively tiny minority want socialism; (2) what will exist when a substantial minority and eventually a large majority want socialism; (3) what will exist when socialism has been established.

On (1), we draw the conclusion that the urgent priority is to help the emergence of more and more socialists by spreading the view that capitalism can never be reformed to work in the interest of the majority and that bringing the means of wealth production into common ownership under democratic control is the only way out. Today, then, socialist activity as such is essentially educational and consciousness-raising.

On (2), we can’t predict and don’t want to lay down how a socialist minority in the course of becoming the majority will or should act. That will be for it to decide, but we can expect that it will try to extract what concessions it can, by organising in the ways you suggest as well as in a mass socialist party. Hopefully, the mass socialist party will pursue the same policy that we do and not make the mistake of deciding to itself seek support on the basis of being able to extract such concessions rather than exclusively for abolishing capitalism. That can be left to trade unions and other popular organisations. No doubt, on the eve of the winning of political control, plans will have been drawn up to be implemented once such control has been won. But, again, we can’t usefully predict or lay down now what they should be. That will be for those around at the time to decide in the light of then existing conditions.

On (3), socialism will have a democratic decision-making structure but again, we don’t want to be too prescriptive, and it may be, for example, that delegates could be sent to local councils and even a central decision-making body on the basis of where people live rather than just on where they work. 

Editors.

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

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

“Socialism’s prospects have never been better”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evel Economakis

Reply:

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

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

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

Editors

Next Step for Humanity (2024)

Pamphlet Review from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Moss

Socialism and Industrial Organisation (1932)

From the May 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader asks : 

“What is the attitude of the S.P.G.B. to the industrial organisations of the workers. All the other parties claiming to represent the interests of the workers have always had some policy in this matter. The S.P.G.B. appears to lack one. The I.L.P. support the Trade Unions, the Communists back the Minority Movement, the S.L.P. advocated Industrial Unionism, and the B.S.P. favoured certain forms of syndicalism. Where does the S.P.G.B. Stand ?”

Towards the end of last century the work that had been done in placing the workers’ slave position in a clearer light and inducing them to organise on this basis was diverted by trade-union leaders into narrow trade-union channels, and the political parties that arose, such as the S.D.F. and I.L.P. felt compelled to pander to this side in order to attract membership.

When the Industrial Unionist movement first came into existence its appeal on the surface appeared to be so strong that the established parties anticipated that it would sweep the board. Consequently they modified their policy to prevent the feared landslide in membership and to attract more members by appealing directly on the ground of helping the workers in their immediate demands.

The ideas of syndicalists are a survival from conditions in the early days of the capitalist system before improved means of transport and communication and the extension of the franchise had made it possible for a class organisation of the workers to be established. Such ideas arose in countries where capitalism was still immature and where the ranks of the factory workers were still being recruited from among the small producers, i.e., peasants and handicraftsmen. These people carry their old ideas of property relations with them into the new conditions of life. They were accustomed to owning their instruments of production, small plots of land, small workshops and simple tools, either as individuals or as small groups, and when brought into contact with capitalist exploitation they readily adopted the idea that the factory should belong to the group working in it.

At the same time the State appears to these people as a power apart which must be overthrown, but which they cannot hope to control.

In England the developments of international commercial and financial relations have long ago shown such ideas to be obsolete. The mass of the workers have accepted the notion that they cannot do without capital, and that, therefore, the workers in any particular factory are dependent (through the capitalists) upon the rest of the workers in capitalist society. The wage contract hides from them the fact that the capitalists are a parasitical class.

The struggle between the industrial workers and their employers takes, therefore, the form of collective bargaining which requires organisation of a wider scope than that of a factory group. Hence we have Trade Unions accepting the capitalist system of production and trying to obtain for their members the full market price of their labour-power. Socialists organised in the S.P.G.B. recognise that these efforts are necessary under capitalism, but we also recognise that the establishment of adult suffrage provided the workers with a weapon with which they can end capitalism. We regard Trade Unions as insufficient in any case and, in so far as they are composed of non-Socialists, their actions are frequently found to be reactionary, both upon the industrial and the political fields. We do not, however, regard this as a reason for advocating and supporting policies which prove upon examination to be even more reactionary.

Policies which encourage the workers in different industries to entertain the idea that they have interests distinct from those of other sections of the workers, or that incite them to attempt to defy the forces of the State, only result in the weakening of their existing organisations and delay the time when they will organise as a class. Actual history demonstrates that the Trade Unions are superior to alleged alternative forms of organisation as a means of dealing with capitalist conditions, and that in spite of their weaknesses the former survive where the latter are either absorbed or entirely disappear.

Our critic mentions the S.L.P. Its attempts to found an industrial union in this country were a complete failure, and the same may be said of the syndicalist movement with which certain members of the B.S.P., such as Tom Mann, were associated. Towards the latter end of the War, however, leaders of these bodies acquired temporary prominence through their association with the shop stewards and factory committees movement. The comb-out for military needs placed a premium upon skilled workers, and as the employing concerns were making abnormal profits, minor concessions were made to keep the industries working smoothly. An illusory “Workers’ control” became the slogan of the day, misleading many into believing that their emancipation was at hand.

The termination of the War reversed these conditions. The return of millions of workers from the army coupled with the shutting down of munition works and other sources of military supplies, weighted the scale more heavily in favour of the employers in relation to their employees. Leaders of factory committees became leaders of the unemployed, and began to turn their attention from specifically industrial matters to political agitation.

The S.L.P. and B.S.P. went to pieces, and from the confusion arose the Communist Party. The tactics of this body have varied from support of men like A. J. Cook in 1928 (with his policy of nationalisation) to the support of breakaway leaders, such as Allan, of the United Mineworkers of Scotland. Futility has invariably been the outcome and the leaders of the Minority Movement have frequently confessed their failure. (See Daily Worker, Jan. 25th.)

It is instructive to turn to the history of similar movements in other countries. In his “Works Councils in Germany,” Mr. C. W. Guillebaud gives an interesting and detailed account of post-war industrial movements in that country. While the end of hostilities produced somewhat similar results there as in Britain, there was a difference which became more marked as time went on. The German industrial capitalists had to turn from the supply of war materials to the indemnifying of the Allied Powers, which involved a considerable maintenance of production. It was deemed expedient, therefore, to give to the factory committees or works councils a definite legal standing, which, combined with other minor concessions, secured what the masters wanted, i.e., a certain measure of industrial peace. As the author puts it :—

“In 1922 and, indeed, throughout the first four years after the War the councils were often able to extract concessions from the employers by virtue of their bargaining strength and that of organised labour in general. Prices were rising continuously, trade was brisk, and while a strike meant a considerable sacrifice of profits the inflationary process lessened the importance of elements of cost which would have bulked much larger in the eyes of the employers in a period of industrial depression.” (pp. 97-8.)

The boom collapsed towards the end of 1923. The number of those in receipt of unemployment benefit rose from a quarter of a million in September to a million and-a-half in February, 1921 (p. 108). The effect of this upon the position of the workers can be readily guessed.

“(It) placed the employers in a position of unqualified strength within the factory and business undertaking. The Works Councils found themselves forced to remain strictly on the defensive, and became, in fact, more concerned with the question whether they themselves would join the unemployed and have to subsist on the mere pittance given in the form of unemployment benefit, than with the stalwart upholding of their rights and privileges.” (pp. 109, 110.)

Thus the factory committees came up against the same economic forces which placed severe limits upon the activities of trades unions. So far from supplanting these bodies, the works councils were absorbed by degrees in the general movement. Still more striking is the evidence provided by Mr. Maurice Dobb concerning the fate of the factory committee movement in Russia. Describing the situation during the few months prior to the Bolshevik seizure of power, he says :—

“Already under Kerensky factory committees had been given certain powers, and in some cases had assumed or tried to assume more powers than they were actually given so that the industrialists were loudly clamouring for the suppression of the committees within reasonable bounds and the restoration of workshop discipline. Cases of actual seizure of factories were not unknown, though still exceptional ; but quite considerable interference with the management was more general and seems to have been prompted in most cases by the desire of the workers to prevent the closing down of the work and their own dismissal.” (Russian Economic Developments, p. 35.)

For tactical reasons the Bolsheviks supported this movement, but their assumption of power in 1917 led to a conflict between them and the factory committees, in which the latter eventually got the worst of it. As Dobb puts it :—

“After the taking of the political key positions in October, the question of factory committees and workers’ control was still regarded from a tactical standpoint. . . . Industry still remained predominantly under the command of the capitalist, and an extensive system of workers’ control, backed by the political influence of the new Bolshevik State, was regarded as the best way of ensuring that the continued rule of the capitalist in the industrial sphere should be no more than that of a limited monarch.” (p. 38.)

The Bolsheviks were in no position to dispossess the capitalists entirely and establish Socialism. Hence they soon found themselves under the necessity of supporting them against the factory committees.

“What the new government principally feared was that the owners of the factories would bring pressure to bear by closing the factories and locking out the workers. These fears considerably influenced the Decree on Workers’ Control of November 14th, 1917.”

Whilst this gave the committees the right to inspect accounts and maintain discipline,

“Article 7 reserved to the proprietor the sole executive right of giving orders as to the running of the concern, and expressly forbade the factory committees to interfere.” (p. 39.)

The development of the civil war made centralised control of immediate importance to the new State. Thus we read that :—

“In cases of essential industries Vesenha (Supreme Economic Council) elaborated plans of organisation and itself sent officials from the centre to cajole or override the factory committees, conciliate the technical staffs and start production again upon some more satisfactory basis. At the same time the anarchism of the factory committees themselves was curbed by merging them with the trades unions. . . . Trade union influence could now be exercised to secure a uniform policy and observance of government orders and decrees on the part of the factory committees.” (p. 46.)

So that in the very country where it reached the peak of its development, the movement for “workers’ control” eventually became merely a means for securing the survival and smoother running of capitalism. The productive forces cannot be permanently fettered anywhere by such utopian and reactionary conceptions.

Only the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production can emancipate the workers from capitalist control. The establishment of society upon this basis can be accomplished only by the conscious political action of the workers as a class. Workers who grasp these facts are not to be hypnotised by claims made on behalf of any so-called “revolutionary” industrial organisation.

Eric Boden

Blogger's Note:

See the article 'Socialism and Industrial Unionism' in the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letter: Anton Pannekoek and the SPGB (2003)

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

Anton Pannekoek and the SPGB

Dear Editors,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R. Cumming, 

Glasgow

Reply: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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