Download Marxism and the state: an exchange

Marxism and the state: an exchange
For socialists, the issue of the state is vital. What is its class character? What programme and
policies should we put forward? These questions were recently raised by Michael Wainwright
in his statement, Re: Marxists and the State, in which he argues that the Socialist Party and its
predecessor, Militant, have adopted a reformist as opposed to a Marxist position. Michael has
since left the party, but we still consider it important to debate the issues he raises. Lynn
Walsh replies: The State: A Marxist Programme and Transitional Demands.
Re: Marxists and the State
Michael Wainwright
Over the last two and half years my involvement in the Socialist Party has given me a
considerable degree of organisational proficiency – the ability to intervene within the labour
movement as a whole – as well as a thirst for politically educating myself so as to
successfully confront opportunism and all shades of reformism.
Since becoming a member, my consciousness has dramatically shifted from left reformism
towards a revolutionary Marxist perspective. The need to politically understand the dialectical
interconnection between world events and the consciousness (as well as the institutions) of
the working-class is of fundamental importance to the struggle against capitalism.
Consciously apprehending the basic precepts of Marxism-Leninism as the guiding analytical
perspective for formulating programmatic positions is an elemental necessity for any
revolutionary party.
Through a fairly comprehensive review and assessment of the history of our organisation, and
its methodology since 1964, I have been troubled by a number of contradictions and
omissions, which lead me to question the theoretical and practical basis of our politics.
On a recent re-reading of our pamphlet "Socialism in the 21st Century" I noticed something in
Chapter 6 that had not properly registered the first time:
"A socialist government could only defend itself if it mobilised the active support of
the working class. And it would only be by demonstrating its power in practise that the
working class could successfully defend its democratically elected socialist
government."
I had thought it was our position, as a Marxist organisation, that the establishment of working
class power required a revolution to create a workers' state - something entirely different from
socialists gaining administration of the existing capitalist state after winning a parliamentary
majority through bourgeois elections.
The "What is the state?" section of our "What is Marxism?" pack has a very different
approach from that in "Socialism in the 21st Century":
"The basic attitude of Marxism to the capitalist state is summed up by Lenin in the
above mentioned 'State and Revolution'. Lenin points out that Marxist revolutionaries,
as opposed to reformists, say that the existing Bourgeois state cannot be seized readymade and used in the interests of the working class. It must be broken up, smashed,
and replaced by a new workers' state."
The apparent contradiction between the two positions impelled me to look further into our
history on this question a bit (and even make a trip, when visiting a friend, to the Militant
archive at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, Manchester) and what I found
was that we have been putting forward similar ideas for a very long time. For instance, in
Militant issue 767b, 27th September 1985, when elaborating upon the need for the labour
movement to take control of the "commanding heights of the economy to be nationalised" as a
means towards achieving Socialism, Rob Sewell correctly stated that "profit is the sole
driving force of the system. To increase profitability is paramount for the capitalists who own
the economy. They will through a thousand and one channels- directly or indirectly- sabotage
any government that resists such plans." The latter couldn't be more true, however, (and I
apologise for the lengthy quotes which follow but it is necessary to clarify this point) Sewell
went on to say:
"A Labour government is always elected in times of crisis, when the desire for change
is at its highest. Under these conditions the next Labour government will be a
government of crisis, when the desire for change is at its highest, entirely different to
any post-war Labour governments. It will be the sum of pressure and counter-pressure
that will decide the path it follows. Instead of bowing the knee to capital and hoping to
run capitalism better than the Tories, it should immediately push through an
emergency `Enabling Act' through Parliament. [My emphasis - MW]"
This was quite an admission, which I was astonished by when I first read it. Why would a
Marxist organisation suggest that parliament, the mechanism for ensuring ruling-class
privilege through stable liberal-democracy will allow a Socialist republic to be
"democratically", and peacefully, brought about through a Labour government? If this quote,
and there are many like it from that period, is read in isolation from the rest of the text one
might imagine that it has some sort of transitional quality to it even though it comes across as
reformist in essence. A raw person might presume that any such "Enabling Act", if brought
about, would have been defended by the Labour movement, presumably, against the violent
onslaught form the owners of capital who, in that situation, would employ any means
necessary to dislocate a Labour government of that kind through their influence over the
army, police and foreign imperialist forces. Yet Sewell went on to argue that:
"Such emergency legislation is not new- it was used by the Tories in 1971 to
nationalise Rolls Royce in less than 24 hours! Such measures used by Labour would
make it possible for the House of Lords and Monarchy to be abolished and the top 200
monopolies, banks and insurance companies to be nationalised, under democratic
workers' control and management.
"Compensation should only be paid on the basis of proven need. Only by taking these
measures so that the `commanding heights' are brought into common ownership will
the laws of capitalism be ended and a proper planning of resources be instituted."
This is, in my view, a clear and unambiguous statement of reformist methodology. The abject
reliance upon the bourgeois state, or the Labour party (as a supposed revolutionary
organisation) taking the reins and utilising the existing state apparatus to institute socialism
rather than calling for breaking it up and the development of alternative working class
organisations (workers' militias, local Soviets and factory committees) is, at best, sowing the
seeds of dangerous illusions within the working-class and, at worst, preparing the future
ground for an accommodation to the needs and logic of capitalism.
Re-reading our manifesto in the light of Lenin's postulations, as outlined above, I also have
concerns about our approach to the question of policing. We call for:
"Community control of the police to ensure they work with and implement the
policing priorities advocated by the communities."
I have come to the conclusion that the suggestion in our manifesto that socialists can establish
a workers' state through parliamentary electoral activity is closely connected with the above
idea which clearly implies that the police, who are a central pillar of the capitalist state, can
indeed be "seized ready-made and used in the interests of the working class".
This too is apparently not a recent concoction of ours as Issue 565, 14th August 1981, in an
article entitled "Make the police accountable" about a demonstration in Liverpool at that time,
illustrates:
"Socialists are not opposed to the police fighting crime and arresting criminals. To
fight real crime and arrest the real criminals- as even more intelligent, `liberal'
policemen like Alderson, Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall, recognised- needs
the support of the people generally…The police must be subject to the supervision of
democratically elected watch committees, which will have the power to appoint and
dismiss senior officers as well as to supervise and check the role and methods of the
police. Democratic watch committees must be able to discipline and, if necessary,
dismiss any police officers found guilty of serious misconduct or illegal actions. There
can be no doubt that there are some corrupt and racialist elements within the police,
and they must be kicked out. At the same time, however, the labour movement must
campaign for full trade union rights for policemen and police women. In the past, the
police themselves have taken strike action and have at various times demonstrated
sympathy for workers in struggle. It is in the workers' vital interests that the police
force should be made democratically accountable and that the police ranks should be
brought into the trade union movement."
In Issue 571, 3rd October 1981, p-8, one can see that the idea of watch committees, forwarded
as a key programmatic demand of ours, could well have been taken from the good old days
when, in the past, the police:
"were not always unaccountable to local authorities. When, after the formation of the
Metropolitan police in 1829, police forces were gradually created in the boroughs,
they were under the control of `watch committees' made up of council members, who
appointed the constables, and their officers, and fixed their pay and controlled their
work. When the county councils were reformed in the 1880s `standing joint
committees' were created, comprising of half county councillors and half local
magistrates, with similar powers to the borough watch committees."
This illumination by Lynn Walsh relating to the Brixton riots, entitled: "Make the police
Accountable", refers to the historian, T.A. Crichley, as a means of expanding upon this idea
that there was an organic development of police accountability which arose out of the very
inception of early British capitalism. Walsh cites Crichley again by saying:
"The control of the watch committees was absolute…In its hands lay the sole power to
appoint, promote and punish men of all ranks, and it had powers of suspension and
dismissal. The watch committee prescribes the regulations for the force, and subject to
the approval of the town council determined the rates of pay."
Presumably this quote was invoked for the purposes of not only explaining the history behind
the idea of watch committees and the latter's apparent facet of democratic accountability, but
also as a suggestion that this is the model for the workers movement to follow. However, later
on in the article Lynn Walsh states that:
"The borough councils (in the 19th Century) were dominated by the industrial and
commercial capitalist class. They paid for the police through their rates, and therefore
they insisted they controlled the police…The propertied middle class which
championed parliamentary government took it for granted that a body like the police,
which potentially had enormous power, should be democratically controlled. This,
however, was in the era before the working class had become an independent political
force."
So again, we are presented here with what can only be described as the congealed illusions of
our position on the police and the state. The above quote suggests, clearly, that the method for
Marxists is to push the working-class organisations of Labour to take control of the existing
police force (which Marxists should characterise correctly as being instruments of the
capitalist state machinery) and guide them towards the interests of that class just as the
middle-class industrialists had enacted a democratic check on the local police forces through
the respective elected local governments. Do we really envisage a return to the by-gone era
when democracy prevailed over the police force (of course, it is accepted that this was
democracy for the privileged and middle classes)? Is it, perhaps, a historical insight into the
potentialities of a future socialist policing system run on the basis of democratically elected
local soviets, and in this way an important point to unearth when attempting to guide
politically conscious layers towards the need for visualising an alternative society that is
workable?
I think it is worrying that we are relying on a schematically bourgeois framework, in order to
serve as a blue-print, to even highlight how a future socialist policing system might operate.
In any case the latter blurs the crucial issue of how to defend the class now when confronted
with major attacks from the state. Further, it has become clear to me that there is an indication
of a clear and unadulterated, yet somehow unconscious, augmentation of reformism on the
part of our programme, as it was then, for the defence of the class:
"The end of the first world war in 1918 brought a massive radicalisation of the
workers, with enormous struggles and strike battles. Labour councillors began to be
elected in many towns and cities, with the emergence of a number of Labourcontrolled councils. The attempt of the sate to take control of the police out of the
hands of local government and concentrate it centrally was also made more urgent by
the police strikes of 1918 and 1919. After the strikes, the Desborough committee was
set up to overhaul the whole police structure, and many of its recommendations were
adopted. One recommendation was that the power of appointment, promotion and
discipline, should be transferred form the watch committees to Chief Constables.
"This, however, was still resisted in Parliament, and the powers remained formally in
the hands of watch committees until 1964."
To be precise it was the 1964 Police Act (and Police (Scotland) Act 1967) that tipped the
balance of power, in relation to police chiefs, away from local watch committees and towards
central government.
Once again Lynn Walsh states that:
"They [MW - the ruling class] have recognised that the relative social peace of the
post-war period ended with the ebbing of the economic boom. They see that the
coming period, with the continued catastrophic decline of British capitalism and the
inevitable erosion of living standards, will be one of head-on conflict with the working
class. They have therefore discarded the old `liberal', `democratic' face of the British
ruling class and instead are presenting a brutal, repressive visage. These developments,
particularly with the perspective of the Andertons, make it vitally important for the
labour movement to campaign for the democratisation of the police."
A defining statement, if ever there was one, on the reasoning and logic behind our position on
the police. It appears that police are viewed, by us, as an isolated entity, which can become
removed, or extracted, from the clutches of the capitalist state through working-class control
of local watch committees. However, then another contradiction arises:
"In transforming society, it is utopian to think that the exiting apparatus of the
capitalist state can be taken over and adapted by the working class. In a fundamental
change of society, all the existing institutions of the state (aren't the police-force part
of those existing institutions?) will be shattered and replaced by new organs of power
under the democratic control of the working class. The campaign for this should go
hand in hand with the battle to extend democratic control over the existing state
institutions. In the case of the police, a lead has been given by the Greater London
Labour Party, which included in its last GLC election manifesto proposals for
democratisation of the Metropolitan police."
So, on the one hand we are prepared to argue for the "shattering" of the existing capitalist
state apparatus whilst at the same time proposing that those very instruments of the state (the
police etc.) can be made accountable to the local community via a "democratisation". This
contradiction is too great to ignore in my view.
Recently some comrades in have raised some good questions along these same lines with
regard to the immigration police who are members of the PCS:
"…taking up this issue within trade unions, especially one that organises state depts, is
difficult to say the least. A great deal of skill to explain the issues is needed. But the
pcs statement doesn't even try and take it up! it totally ignores it! Why doesn't the pcs
statement mention the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers? it is totally passive on
the issue - only concerned with the health and safety of it's own members in
immigration! frankly that's the least of my concerns - and any other decent trade
unionist or socialist feels the same, these people who are complicit in attacking asylum
seekers and immigrants don't deserve health or safety! they clearly have no regard for
the health and safety of others! (i don't think that their health and safety was ever
under threat anyway from a few peaceful protesters). The 'marxist leadership' of the
union should surely have supported the non-violent demonstration against deportations
- they should have been on it infact, with the asylum groups, trade unionists, ssp
members etc. they should also have issued a statement slamming the government's
treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants, detainment, forced deportations etc. and
told union members to play no part in these actions or be expelled from the union.
What's the point of Marxists winning the leadership of a union if they then put
sectional interests (recruiting and retaining members in immigration services) ahead of
the most basic of socialist principles?
i hope we have a bloody good excuse... appeasing immigration services workers so
they remain in the pcs is not a bloody good excuse. Who cares if some reactionaries
would join a yellow union if the pcs took a principled stance? good riddence surely?"
I would totally solidarise with this as it concisely encapsulates a central defect in the way in
which we operate within the trade-unions. I cannot claim to have any experience in this field
and I know that trade union work is both vitally important and quite difficult, and requires
great skill and dedication. But it is clear to me that revolutionaries should not be trying to help
immigration police do their jobs better. They should not be allowed to be members of the PCS
or any other union. We should instead be proposing that the workers' movement mobilise its
forces to defend immigrant workers and resist, by all possible means, immigration police
attempts to harass and deport them. We should be trying to find ways to encourage immigrant
workers to join with, and become a vital part of, the organised trade-union movement. A first
step would be to call on the PCS to rid itself of the immigration police. We should oppose all
those who want to dismember and divide our class on the basis of narrow, sectional, interests
which, in the final analysis, pander towards social patriotism by placing their (British)
interests above those of workers from other countries.
Further, it is a mistake to view the police in general as "workers in uniform" who should be
treated like any other worker. This is particularly clear when class conflicts, such as the
miners strike in 1984, collide with the strategic requirements of the police-force who are
charged with suppressing civil unrest. As we say in the "What is Marxism?" pack "The police,
together with the army, constitute the central `body of armed people' which is at the centre of
the state apparatus. They are the first line of defence against anything which disturbs the
public order of capitalism."
As an experiment, I went to the Marxist Internet Archive, looked up Trotsky to see what he
would have to say. When I put in the word "policeman" the fifth quote that came up was the
following from "Vital Questions for the German Proletariat," January 27, 1932:
"The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist State is a
bourgeois cop, not a worker."
I think that Trotsky was right, and that we have been drastically wrong on this central issue.
Our "What is Marxism?" pack makes some valuable points about the police (and the army)
but at the same time suggests that it is wrong for socialists to propose their abolition because
of the current low consciousness of the working class:
"However, despite our understanding of their objective role, simple demands for the
abolition of the police and army would be out of line with the consciousness of many
amongst the advanced layers. We attempt therefore to raise demands which are not too
in advance of current consciousness but which seek to reveal and undermine the state's
repressive function."
Whilst it is certainly true that our demands need to engage with, and intersect, the existing
consciousness of workers if we are ever going to change it, it seems obvious to me that the
demands we raise today must be consistent with our long term goals, or at least not contradict
them. The problem with calls for achieving socialism through bourgeois parliamentary
elections, or instituting "democratic control of the police" or demanding improvements in the
working conditions of the immigration police is that they contradict the fundamental duty of
socialists to inform the working-class that the capitalists' state cannot be taken over, but
rather, as I quoted earlier, "It must be broken up, smashed, and replaced by a new workers'
state". Rather than "revealing and undermining the state's repressive function" these demands
actively encourage illusions that the capitalist state, or at least key elements of it, can be
forced to serve workers' interests. We should instead be raising demands that point to the
rigged nature of capitalist "democracy" and lead to the conclusion that it is necessary to
shatter the bourgeois state and replace it with new working class organs of power.
It is crucial for Marxists to pose the difficult, and sometimes socially ostracising, reality that
the capitalist state must be removed and replaced by alternative structures of working-class
power. There is no other way, I suggest, of relating and connecting this fundamental necessity
to our class other than to state the truth, even if that truth is one which diminishes our
popularity. Marxists are not populists – we have a much harder task. That is the responsibility
to maintain the link in the chain of revolutionary continuity by developing and charting a path
towards Socialism armed with the distilled lessons of past class-struggles. We must stand
firmly on the tradition based upon the historical legacies of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky,
for if we deviate from the latter then we will inevitably recede into empiricism and the eternal
present.
I cannot accept that our party is in fact, all things considered, standing firmly within the
category of revolutionary Marxism. I do not doubt that the majority of us want to fight for a
Socialist change in society, however, the history of our organisation, and our programmatic
positions, has significant elements of an outright reformist strategy. At the same time many
SP comrades have real revolutionary fervour. I have not regretted being a member of this
organisation, many of whose members are passionate, hard-working, committed and vibrant
but I have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to build a party based upon a genuine
Trotskyist programme, and that, in the long term, outweighs the need to mobilise the greatest
number possible around a more limited reformist agenda, in the short term. Confusion,
dissimulation, and ultimately betrayal are the only possible outcomes of political formations
that “leave till later” the fundamental principles of Marxism. For these reasons I feel I have no
choice but to resign from the Socialist Party.
The State: A Marxist Programme and Transitional Demands
Lynn Walsh
INTRODUCTION
On 29 March, Michael Wainwright posted a statement on the Socialist Party Youth Forum,
‘Re: Marxists and the State’. Having reviewed some of our material, Michael had come to the
conclusion that the Socialist Party and its predecessor Militant have adopted a reformist
position on the state. Several members of the list responded to his statement, answering some
of his points. Very soon, however, Michael sent a slightly longer version of his statement –
together with a letter resigning from the Socialist Party. Evidently, he had already decided on
his exit strategy and was not interested in debating the issues he raised within the party.
We disagree with Michael, but the issues he raises are important and we think that, if
there are political differences, they should be debated. Michael’s “fairly comprehensive
review” actually focuses mainly on some Militant articles published in the 1980s, dealing
with our general programme and the police. As it happens, some of the articles to which he
refers, together with others on the question of the state, were brought together in a pamphlet,
entitled ‘The State: A Warning to the Labour Movement’, published in 1983. This is available
on the web (http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/pamphlets/state). The pamphlet is just one
selection of articles on the state from that period, but it contains ample material to refute
Michael’s criticisms. The issue of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and
Immigration Service workers raised by Michael will be dealt with separately.
THE SOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETY
Surely, asks Michael, our aim is “the establishment of working class power… a revolution to
create a workers' state”. The bourgeois state must be “broken up, smashed, and replaced by a
new workers’ state,” with the formation of workers’ militias, local soviets and factory
committees. In the midst of a revolution, of course, like Russia in 1917 or Spain in 1936, such
basic aims might provide some guidance for the drawing up of a revolutionary action
programme. A situation of dual power, with a struggle for power between the capitalists and
the working class, and the threat of bourgeois reaction, would undoubtedly pose the question
of a struggle for power. Even in a revolutionary situation, however, a Marxist programme has
to go beyond generalities of smashing the state and establishing workers’ power. In 1917
Lenin and Trotsky put forward concrete demands as the situation developed, to expose and
undermine the role of the Provisional Government and to strengthen the position of the
workers’ and peasants’ soviets. In relation to Spain in 1936, Trotsky advocated concrete
demands that would expose the role of the Popular Front government and prepare the working
class for a struggle to take power into its own hands.
But that was clearly not the position in Britain (or in other advanced capitalist
countries) in the 1980s (the period mainly referred to by Michael). Parliamentary forms of
rule were the norm in the post-war period, and the consciousness of the working class,
including its politically advanced layers, was that, while gains could be made through
industrial struggle, political change would be achieved through the election of governments
based on the traditional labour or social-democratic parties (or in some countries the reformist
communist parties). Our task was to expose the bourgeois limits of these reformist parties, to
show the impossibility of achieving socialism through gradual, step-by-step changes in the
economy and the state. The political influence of the mass reformist parties over big sections
of the working class was an objective fact, and would only be undermined by a combination
of events – through workers’ experience of reformist governments – and the subjective factor
– the intervention of Marxist ideas and policies.
Through our publications, meetings, interventions, etc, we conducted a political
struggle against reformism and Stalinism. However, theory and propaganda reaches only a
relatively small, politicised layer, except in exceptional periods of intensified class struggle.
Reaching broader layers requires a programme, and the key task during the period to which
Michael mainly refers was to popularise the idea of a socialist programme. The key planks are
the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, a plan of production, and
workers’ control and management of industry. Moreover, we always stressed that such
measures would have to be extended on an international basis.
By themselves, of course, such measures would not add up to a socialist society. But
they pointed to the social foundations on which the working class could proceed to build a
socialist society. Our programme presented the case for “the socialist transformation of
society” – a popularised form of ‘socialist revolution’. We use this formulation to avoid the
crude association between ‘revolution’ and ‘violence’ always falsely made by apologists of
capitalism. A successful socialist transformation can be carried through only on the basis of
the support of the overwhelming majority of the working class, with the support of other
layers, through the most radical forms of democracy. On that basis, provided a socialist
government takes decisive measures on the basis of mobilising the working class, it would be
possible to carry though a peaceful change of society. Any threat of violence would come, not
from a popular socialist government, but from forces seeking to restore their monopoly of
wealth, power and privilege by mobilising a reaction against the democratic majority.
Until the end of the 1980s, we worked within the Labour Party, because of its
dominant position as the vehicle for working-class politics. With the process of
bourgeoisification of the Labour Party in the late 1980s, and the emptying out of its workingclass rank and file, we turned away from Labour and have since campaigned independently as
Militant Labour and subsequently as the Socialist Party. In the earlier period, however, the
majority of workers, including left workers, looked to Labour governments for improvements
and socialist change. That was the existing consciousness. For this to be undermined, workers
had to go through the experience of successive Labour governments. During the 1970s and
1980s, we therefore posed the question to the Labour leaders: If you really want to defend
workers’ interest, if you claim to be advancing towards socialism, carry through a programme
that will take economic control out of the hands of big business. Nationalise the
“commanding heights” of the economy and introduce workers’ control and management. The
idea of an Enabling Act was put forward to cut through the reformist argument that it would
be too complicated, and take too long, to get extensive nationalisation measures through
parliament. It was precisely the idea of short-circuiting the parliamentary ‘checks and
balances’ designed to impede any radical change.
Contrary to Michael’s claim, we never based ourselves on the idea that a socialist
programme (in the popularised form we outlined) could be carried through using existing
parliamentary procedures. Regarding nationalisation: “Such a step, backed up by the power of
the labour movement outside parliament, would allow the introduction of a socialist and
democratic plan of production to be worked out and implemented by committees of trade
unions, the shop stewards, housewives and small businessmen. With the new technology that
is on hand… it would be possible both to cut the working day and enormously simplify the
tasks of the working class in the supervision and control of the state.” (The Role of the State,
Peter Taaffe – in The State: A Warning to the Labour Movement, p32) Even a superficial
review of our material on this question would show that we warned that big business would
inevitably attempt to sabotage socialist measures and we always raised the need for a
mobilisation of the working class to provide mass support for any anti-capitalist measures
carried out by a Labour government. We raised the need for a transformation of state
institutions from top to bottom, taking them out of the hands of servants of the ruling class
and placing them under the control of elected representatives of the working class. Our
programme put demands on the Labour leaders, who were seen by most politicised workers as
their representatives in government, but our approach was not based on an electoralist
strategy.
The experience of Chile in 1970-73, to take the best known example, was repeatedly
used to show the need for a root-and-branch transformation of the state. In the case of Chile, a
revolutionary situation was opened up by the election of the popular front government under
Allende (which included the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the bourgeois Radical
Party). It had a radical programme, which included some nationalisation measures (of the
copper industry, for instance), but fell far short of a programme of socialist transformation.
Political developments of this type, with the election of left parties to government on the basis
of mass radicalisation of the workers, are a typical scenario for the development of
revolutionary crisis in capitalist countries with a parliamentary form of rule. In such a
situation, Marxists have to advance a programme that relates concretely to the role of a
‘socialist’ (popular front) government and to the necessary tasks posed before the working
class. In Chile between 1970-73, bald calls on the lines of ‘down with the Allende
government’, ‘smash the state’ and ‘for a workers’ government’ would have been be
completely inadequate.
We advocated that Marxists in Chile should call on the Allende government to take
decisive control of the economy through nationalisation of the copper mines and basic
industries, while supporting the poor peasants in carrying through a radical land reform. We
also called for decisive measures against the developing counter-revolution, led by the tops of
the military, the big landlords and capitalists. We warned that it was a fatal mistake on the
part of Allende to try to buy off the military reaction by promoting the military tops to more
powerful positions and increasing the pay of the officer class. While calling on Allende to
take bold socialist measures, we advocated the organisation of the workers from below, with
the strengthening of factory committees and the ‘cordones’, effectively local soviet-type
organisations. We also advocated the democratisation of the armed forces, with the purging of
reactionary officers and control of the armed forces being placed in the hands of committees
of soldiers, sailors and airmen. When it was clear that the reactionary forces were preparing
for a counter-revolutionary coup, we called for the arming of the working class to defend
itself against a bloody reaction.
There was no question, moreover, of our treating these developments as if they were a
purely Chilean development. “The lessons of Chile, written in the blood of more than 50,000
martyred workers, is a warning to the labour movement here.” (The State…, p28)
The same article (and there were many other articles elsewhere) rejected the theory of
the leaders of the Communist Parties of France, Italy and Spain (the so-called ‘Eurocommunist’ trend) used to justify the approach of the Socialist and Communist Party leaders
in Chile under the Allende government. “However, it would be fatal to pretend, as the
Communist Party leaders and the reformist left of the Labour Party do, that ‘the
democratisation of the state’ will be sufficient in itself to guarantee the British working class
and a Labour government against the fate which befell their Chilean brothers and sisters.
Piecemeal measures will neither satisfy the working class nor the middle class, but will
inflame the opposition of the capitalists – and, moreover, give them the time and opportunity
to strike a decisive blow against the labour movement. This would above all be the case when
attempts are made to ‘democratise’ their state. The capitalists would take this as a signal –
particularly if the army is touched – to prepare to crush the labour movement.” (The State…,
pp31-32)
Again: “The lesson of Chile, where in 1973 the Popular Unity government of Salvador
Allende was overthrown and the workers’ movement crushed by Pinochet’s bloody counterrevolution, must be taken as a serious warning to the British as well as to the world labour
movement. Chile underlies the fatal consequences of taking half measures which provoke a
reaction from the ruling class while failing to give the working class decisive control of the
economy and the state. In particular, the lessons of the Allende government’s fundamentally
mistaken policies towards the state’s armed bodies of men must be absorbed by the British
labour movement.” (Introduction – The State…, pp9-10)
The example of Chile was repeatedly used in our material to demonstrate the
impossibility of a reformist ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ in Britain or elsewhere.
However, the situation in Chile in 1970-73 was not the same as in Britain in the early 1980s.
In Chile it was necessary to call for the arming of the workers to defend themselves and past
democratic and social gains from the threatening counter-revolution. Is Michael seriously
suggesting that we should have been calling for workers’ militias and the arming of the
proletariat in Britain in the 1980s – or today, for that matter? Such demands do not
correspond to the situation today in Britain or most other countries, and they do not
correspond to the current consciousness of even the advanced layers of workers. Marxists
have to study the history of such demands and the vital role they play in the appropriate
conditions – where there is a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation in which the
working class is threatened by a bloody reaction. But to raise today the slogans of ‘smashing
the state’ and ‘arming the workers’ would not win workers to socialism or prepare them to
carry through a change in society. On the contrary, such methods, if adopted by organisations
with any real influence among workers, would alienate workers and play into the hands of our
class enemies. Our main task today is to win support for the idea of a socialist society, for a
socialist transformation carried through under the leadership of the working class. There is no
question of our abandoning our long-term aims. But in order to build mass support for
socialism we have to present our programme in a popular form that will get a response from
workers. While advocating a socialist transformation of society, we have to struggle for
partial and transitional demands, for the basic interests and needs of working people.
THE ROLE OF THE POLICE
Michael focuses much of his criticism on our position on the police, referring in particular to
several articles published in Militant in 1981. He considers that our position on the police is
based on “reformist methodology” and reflects “congealed illusions” in the possibility of
“establish[ing] a workers’ state through electoral activity”. Our mistake, according to
Michael, was in not putting forward our full programme based on the idea that the capitalist
state “must be broken up, smashed, and replaced by a new workers’ state”. Instead, our
intervention in the events of 1981 was primarily based on immediate, democratic demands on
the police put forward in a transitional way.
Michael quotes from Militant articles first published in 1981 at the time of the riots in
Brixton, Toxteth, Bristol, and several other British cities. They were also reprinted in 1983 in
the Militant pamphlet, ‘The State: A Warning to the Labour Movement’.
The three articles on the police quoted were a small part of the material we produced
in relation to the riots, which were really uprisings of some of the poorest inner-city areas.
The economic and social decay of these areas, aggravated by the slump after 1980 (intensified
by the policies of the Thatcher government) created the conditions for the upheaval. However,
it was the aggressive and provocative methods used by the police that provided the trigger,
and we continually emphasised the responsibility of the police at the time (see the section on
‘The Riots’ in ‘The Rise of Militant’, by Peter Taaffe, pp163-166).
Young people, both black and white, were to the forefront of these events, and right
from the start supporters of Militant (the predecessor of the Socialist Party) were present to
help organise the defence of the areas from further police attacks and (as opposed to merely
‘rioting’) to win young people to socialist ideas.
We called for an end of police harassment and for the disbanding of the Special Patrol
Group, the most aggressive section of the police at that time. We related the role of the police
to the social situation. Our key demands were: “An urgent labour movement enquiry, step up
the fight for socialist solutions to the social and economic crisis underlying the explosion [and
for an] enquiry into the police.” (Militant 548, 17 April 1981)
We stressed the need for the young people of the area and the wider community to
organise to defend themselves against police harassment and a clampdown on the areas
through prosecutions and vicious prison sentences in the aftermath of the upheavals. We set
up the Labour Committee for the Defence of Brixton, which played an important part in
exposing the role of the police, defending those facing charges, and calling mass meetings at
which our policies were put forward.
Among our policies were the demand for a thorough-going enquiry into the police
(going beyond the limits of the slow-moving Scarman enquiry set up by the Thatcher
government) and measures to establish democratic checks on the police through elected
committees involving labour-movement representatives.
Michael considers such demands to be irredeemably reformist. Nowhere, however,
does he say what demands he thinks we should have been putting forward. From what he
writes we can only conclude that he would have been advocating demands on the following
lines: Smash the state! Fight the police! Form workers’ militias!
Such slogans might be appropriate in a revolutionary or at least an immediate prerevolutionary situation, when conditions were ripening for a mass movement of the workers
to take power into their own hands. Even then, slogans on the state would have to be
formulated much more skilfully and concretely than suggested by Michael. Lenin and Trotsky
frequently explained the need for a ‘defensive’ approach, in the sense of putting the
responsibility for revolutionary action (e.g. forming workers’ militias or disbanding capitalist
bodies) on state aggression or counter-revolutionary violence by auxiliaries of the ruling class
(such as fascist bands).
Would Michael argue that there was a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary
situation in Britain in 1981, even in some of the inner-city areas in which there were
upheavals? For a few days, the clashes on the streets between the police and local residents,
especially the youth, had some features of an insurrection. But the clashes involved a minority
of the communities affected (though there was wide sympathy for action on common
grievances). They were not organised, but a spontaneous outburst of anger, and the level of
political consciousness was low, though a section of young people were quickly being
radicalised and were responsive to socialist ideas.
Moreover, it would be absurd to argue that there was a pre-revolutionary situation in
Britain as a whole. The working class suffered a setback as a result of the defeat of the Labour
government in 1979. The Wilson-Callaghan government had introduced monetarist economic
polices and launched attacks on workers’ living standards, especially low-paid local authority
workers. That had produced the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979, a wave of public-sector
strikes. In the absence of a mass alternative on the left, however, Labour’s defeat brought
Thatcher to power and the assault on the working-class rights and living standards was
redoubled. There was a bitter struggle of print workers on The Times, and other mainly
defensive battles. There were many important workers’ struggles in which we intervened, but
it would be completely fanciful to describe the situation on Britain at that time as prerevolutionary.
In our publications and discussions we explained the Marxist theory of the state and
our programme for the socialist transformation of society. This was done then, as it is now, on
the lines of the ‘What is the State?’ section of the ‘What is Marxism?’ pack quoted by
Michael. Many discussions were based on Lenin’s ‘State and Revolution’ and other Marxist
classics (e.g. Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State).
But for our intervention on the streets of Brixton, Totexth, Bristol, etc, we needed a
programme of immediate demands that corresponded to the situation and pointed in a
transitional way towards a socialist transformation. Calls to ‘Smash the capitalist state! For a
new workers’ state’ would have got no echo. We would have been very isolated – suffering
severe ‘social ostracism’ – in a situation in which we were in fact able, with a correct
approach to demands and slogans, to win a layer of youth to our ranks and get a favourable
response for socialist ideas among a much wider layer.
Some of the ‘front-line’ youth might well have welcomed the idea of an armed militia
– but not necessarily for progressive political motives. Had a ‘militia’ emerged at that point, it
would not have been a democratic defence organisation responsible to democratic workers’
organisations. There was neither the level of consciousness nor organisation necessary for the
formation of a defence force. Any call for an armed defence force would have been far in
advance of the consciousness of even the most politicised sections of organised workers.
Democratic control of the police
However, there was widespread condemnation of the police for the aggressive, paramilitary
methods they had been using, especially the provocative ‘stop and search’ tactic aimed mainly
against black youth. At the same time, in areas like Brixton and Toxteth people wanted
something done about the high levels of crime, especially violent, drug-related crime, which
blighted their lives. There was a broad demand for accountability and control of the police. To
have called for the abolition of the police, however, without the realistic possibility of
alternative workers’ organisations to protect the community, would have been a serious
mistake.
The Thatcher government responded to the broad public mood of criticism of the
police with the Scarman Enquiry. Lord Scarman’s report confirmed that a section of the
police had been systematically harassing black youth. He recommended reforms in police
practices, but naturally wanted to ensure that they were implemented within the framework of
capitalist institutions and legal procedures. For a time, the police adopted more low profile
methods in inner-city areas, though the Scarman reforms did not prevent them from assuming
emergency powers and acting as a paramilitary force against the miners during their titanic
strike of 1984-85, a strike that had many features of a civil war in the coalfields.
In 1981, however, we raised demands for control of the police that went far beyond
anything proposed by Scarman. The key element of our demands was democratic control by
local government police committees – elected bodies involving the working class through
representatives from trade unions, community organisations, etc. We demanded that elected
police committees should have the power to appoint and dismiss chief constables and senior
officers, and would be responsible for ‘operational questions’, that is, day-to-day policing
policies. Police committees should ensure a genuinely independent complaints’ procedure,
and should be responsible for weeding out any racist elements or fascist sympathisers within
the police. We called for the abolition of the Special Patrol Group and other similar units, as
well as the abolition of the Special Branch and destruction of police files and computer
records not connected with criminal investigations.
Local authority police committees, such as the Greater London Council committee,
had become quite prominent in the period before the riots. They played a progressive role in
opening up the police to greater public scrutiny, exposing their worst methods, and trying to
assert some influence over policing priorities or policies. (The recent sycophantic comments
of Ken Livingstone on the head of the Metropolitan police, in spite of the killing of Jean
Charles de Menezes at Stockwell and the outrageous Forest Gate raid, are an indication of
how far the political situation regarding the police and civil rights has been set back since the
1980s.) However, they were ultimately toothless bodies that had no power to assert any
effective control over police policies or day-to-day operations.
Our demand was for bodies that would reflect organised pressure from the working
class, pressure that would be used to check police activities and impose limits on their
methods. The degree to which the police would be checked would depend on sustained
organised pressure from the working class through elected, representative bodies. Of course,
the ruling class (and their political representatives, including Labour leaders) were bitterly
opposed to any such development, which they regarded as a potential encroachment on the
prerogatives of the bourgeois state.
In opposing any steps to democratise control of the police, police chiefs, supported by
many Tory and Labour leaders, argued that increased democratic accountability would subject
the police to ‘political control’: “They try to perpetuate the myth, important for gaining public
acceptance of their role in the past, that the police are an arm of a ‘neutral’ state. They are,
according to this view, ‘above’ politics and sectional interests, and ultimately answerable to
the equally ‘neutral’ and ‘independent’ judiciary.” (The Police, Lynn Walsh – in The State…,
p52)
To answer this line of argument we related some of the history of the police in Britain,
particularly in relation to the development of watch committees. In the nineteenth century,
“the control of the watch committees [over the police] was absolute”. (TA Crichley, History
of the Police in England and Wales) Our approach is: Regarding the police, things were
different in the past and they can be different in the future. There was no question, as Michael
asserts, of arguing that there had been an “organic development of police accountability” and
that this should be extended by the working class. Our references made it clear that past
‘democratic accountability’ of the police was to the bourgeois ruling class, and our demands
were to challenge capitalist control on the basis of working-class struggle.
Our line of argument was: If democratic control of the police was good enough for
them (i.e. the bourgeoisie) why is it regarded as taboo now? Of course, it is a rhetorical
question, we know the answer. But we cannot assume that everybody automatically sees
through the ideological arguments used by the bourgeoisie to legitimise their class role.
Michael seems to assume that it is all self-evident. There is no need for this kind of argument.
Experience shows, however, that such arguments – combined with action – are vital to
changing consciousness.
“In the past, before the working class had emerged as an independent political force,
the spokesmen of big business and the middle class insisted that the police were
democratically accountable. Now, the labour movement, which represents the overwhelming
majority in society, must demand that democratic accountability is extended to cover this
force which, it is claimed, exists to protect the interests of the public.” (The State…, p54)
Reform and revolution
We were putting forward democratic demands, but demands that go to the heart of the
role of the police as an instrument of the bourgeois state and raise the need for the working
class to defend its own interests in the current battle over the role of the police. Were we (as
some will no doubt argue) pandering to the current consciousness of the working class and
failing to defend the Marxist programme on the state?
On the police, we were putting forward immediate, democratic demands, which are
always part of a transitional programme. They corresponded to the consciousness of the
advanced layers of the working class, who wanted a democratic check on the police. The
setting up of democratic police committees cannot be ruled out in a future period of
heightened class struggle. Whether they will be achieved, how far they will go, will be
determined by the strength of working-class struggle. An element of democratic
accountability over the police would help create more favourable conditions for working-class
struggle. But such an element of ‘workers’ control’ could not last indefinitely. Either the
workers would move forward to a socialist transformation of society, or the ruling class
would move to destroy the elements of democratic control.
The concession of elected police committees under pressure from the working class
would be a progressive development. However, if this gave rise to illusions that, as Michael
puts it, the police are “an isolated entity which can become removed, or extracted, from the
clutches of the bourgeois state through working-class control of local watch committees” that
would be a negative development.
During the 1918 German revolution (as noted in the section on the police in The State:
A Warning to the Labour Movement, pp46-47) the Berlin police were in fact “extracted from
the clutches of the capitalist state”, and the revolutionary workers appointed Emil Eichorn, a
leader of the Independent Social Democrats, as police chief. This was a positive step, so far as
it went, but could only be a very temporary situation. The failure of the workers to consolidate
power through new proletarian organs of state power meant that the Berlin police, together
with other ‘revolutionised’ institutions, succumbed to the bloody counter-revolution (for
which the right-wing Social Democratic leaders provided a political cover).
With regard to democratic police committees (or a new form of watch committees),
we clearly warned against any illusion in the step by step reform of the police or other state
bodies into socialist institutions:
“If the working class is to preserve the economic gains and the democratic rights that
it has wrested from the capitalists in the past, it must carry through the socialist
transformation of society. Past gains cannot be preserved indefinitely within the rotten
framework of a crisis-ridden capitalism. In transforming society, it is utopian to think that the
existing apparatus of the capitalist state can be taken over and adapted by the working class.
In a fundamental change of society, all the existing institutions of the state will be shattered
and replaced by new organs of power under the democratic control of the working class.
While basing itself on the perspective of the socialist transformation of society, however, the
labour movement must advance a programme which includes policies which come to grips
with the immediate problems posed by the role of the police.” (The State…, pp53-54)
Michael quotes this passage. But how (he asks) can we, on the one side, advocate
democratic police committees while, on the other, warn that the police cannot be reformed
into a worker-friendly institution? He sees this as a “contradiction [that] is too great to
ignore”.
But it is no more contradictory than demanding any other reform under capitalism.
Reforms can be won through struggle, but we warn that they will not be lasting gains under
capitalism. In the field of democratic rights do we not defend the right to jury trial, legal aid,
procedural safeguards for defendants, and so on? Clearly, such legal rights do not guarantee
real ‘justice’, which is impossible on a juridical plane without a deeper social justice, which is
impossible in capitalist society. But it would be absurd to argue that such legal and civil rights
are of no consequence for the working class. Such rights have been won, clawed back by the
bourgeoisie, re-established for a period, and so on. Demands for social reforms and
democratic rights will always remain an important part of our transitional programme. Legal
and civil rights, like the right to vote, freedom of political association, etc, create more
favourable conditions for working-class struggle. Demands for democratic control of the
police are no different, in principle, from demands for other democratic rights. Doesn’t the
demand for universal suffrage, for instance, reinforce the illusion that an elected parliament
can control the executive of the capitalist state?
The demands that we put forward on the police in 1981 corresponded to the situation
in Britain at that time. Since then, the situation has obviously changed in many respects,
especially since the 9/11 attacks in the US which have provided the political pretext for an
enormous strengthening of the powers of the state and a broad clawing back of legal and
democratic rights conceded in the past. The methodology of our programme remains the
same, but we naturally have to take account of recent changes. But it would be a fatal mistake
to abandon a programme of transitional demands in relation to the state, the police, etc, in
favour of bald denunciations of the ‘repressive capitalist state’ and calls for ‘workers’ power’.
This is all the more important given the general setback to working-class consciousness in the
period since the collapse of Stalinism. There will be many struggles to recoup past gains that
have been lost in the recent period. As we have always done, we will link our immediate and
transitional demands to the need for the socialist transformation of society.
A MARXIST PROGRAMME AND TRANSITIONAL DEMANDS
The formal or ‘logical’ contradiction between, on the one side, demands for reforms and, on
the other, spelling out the need for a socialist transformation of society reflects the very real
contradiction between the objective need for socialism and the immaturity of the
consciousness and organisation of the working class.
Trotsky commented on this issue during a discussion on the Transitional Programme
in 1938. One issue that came up at that time was the Ludlow Amendment, a constitutional
amendment moved in the US Congress which would have required a popular referendum
before the US could go to war. The leadership of the US Socialist Workers Party (the US
section of the Fourth International) opposed support for the Ludlow Amendment on the
grounds that it would promote pacifist and democratic illusions. Trotsky disagreed, and his
comments are relevant to the issue of democratic demands in general.
This is a rather long excerpt from Trotsky’s comment, but it is worth quoting in full
because it illuminates the issue of democratic rights:
“The [SWP] NC declaration states that the war cannot be stopped by a referendum.
That is absolutely correct. This assertion is a part of our general attitude toward war, as an
inevitable development of capitalism, and that we cannot change the nature of capitalism or
abolish it by democratic means. A referendum is a democratic means, but no more and no
less. In refuting the illusions of democracy we don't renounce this democracy so long as we
are incapable of replacing that democracy by the institution of a workers' state. In principle I
absolutely do not see any argument which can force us to change our general attitude toward
democracy in this case of a referendum. But we should use this means as we use presidential
elections, or the election in St Paul [Minnesota]; we fight energetically for our programme.
“We say: The Ludlow referendum, like other democratic means, can't stop the
criminal activities of the sixty families, who are incomparably stronger than all democratic
institutions. This does not mean that I renounce democratic institutions, or the fight for the
referendum, or the fight to give American citizens of the age of eighteen the right to vote. I
would be in favour of our initiating a fight on this; people of eighteen are sufficiently mature
to be exploited, and thus to vote. But that's only parenthetical.
“Now naturally it would be better if we could immediately mobilise the workers and
the poor farmers to overthrow democracy and replace it with the dictatorship of the
proletariat, which is the only means of avoiding imperialist wars. But we can't do it.
“We see that large masses of people are looking toward democratic means to stop the
war. There are two sides to this: one is totally progressive, that is, the will of the masses to
stop the war of the imperialists, the lack of confidence in their own representatives. They say:
Yes, we sent people to parliament [Congress], but we wish to check them in this important
question, which means life and death to millions and millions of Americans. That is a
thoroughly progressive step. But with this they connect illusions that they can achieve this
aim only by this measure. We criticise this illusion. The NC declaration is entirely correct in
criticising this illusion. When pacifism comes from the masses it is a progressive tendency,
with illusions. We can dissipate the illusions not by a priori decisions but during common
action.
“… The situation is now different—it is not a revolutionary situation. But the question
can become decisive. The referendum is not our programme, but it's a clear step forward; the
masses show that they wish to control their Washington representatives. We say: It's a
progressive step that you wish to control your representatives. But you have illusions and we
will criticise them. At the same time we will help you realise your programme. The sponsor of
the programme will betray you as the SRs [Social Revolutionaries] betrayed the Russian
peasants.” (The Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder 1977, pp114117)
A bourgeois cop is a bourgeois cop?
One of the demands we put forward in the Militant in 1981 (and the 1983 pamphlet) was for
“The right of the police to an independent, democratic trade union organisation to defend their
interests as workers.” In Michael’s view, however, “it is a mistake to view the police in
general as ‘workers in uniform’ who should be treated like any other worker”. The role of the
police in the 1984 miners’ strike, he argues, confirms the position of our ‘What is Marxism?’
pack, that “the police, together with the army, constitute the central ‘body of armed people’
which is at the centre of the state apparatus. They are the first line of defence against anything
which disturbs the public order of capitalism.”
As on other issues, Michael can see only one side of the issue: the reactionary,
repressive role of the police as an instrument of state repression. They undoubtedly played an
aggressive, repressive role during the 1984 miners’ strike. The miners, as well as other
sections of militant workers, certainly did not regard the police as ‘any other workers’. They
organised to counter police tactics, and took them on in massive confrontations, notably the
battle of Orgreave. Similarly, in the 1972 miners’ strikes, the flying pickets countered the
police and defeated them at the famous ‘battle of Saltley gates’ (where miners’ pickets and
other workers blockaded the Midlands’ coal depot). Support for trade union rights for the
police ranks (or for the army ranks, for that matter) does not for a moment cloud our analysis
of the role of the police and army as part of the state apparatus, or undermine the recognition
of the need to organise against police or military repression.
This is only one side of the question, however. The other side of a revolutionary
policy (which Michael, with his characteristic black-and-white approach, fails to see) is a
policy of making a political appeal to the ranks of the police and the army and supporting
their democratic rights, including the right to organise in a trade union. Anything that
weakens the authoritarian control of the state over the ranks of the police (and the army) and
brings their ranks, or even a section of their ranks, nearer to the workers’ movement, helps
create more favourable conditions of struggle for the working class.
But Trotsky rejected this approach, exclaims Michael! He proves this by an
experiment. Searching an internet Trotsky archive with the word ‘policeman’, he came up
with the following quote: “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the
capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.” This quote comes from Trotsky’s article,
‘What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat’, written in 1932. Having googled
this quote from the internet, Michael appears to think that Trotsky’s comment is the last word
on the matter. If he conducted further searches on the context of Trotsky’s comment and the
situation in Germany in 1932, Michael doesn’t bother to relate them to the issue under
discussion. In fact, Michael generally appears to believe that demands, slogans, etc, are
eternal, and that we should uphold them without concerning ourselves about changing
conditions.
The situation in 1932 in Germany was not the same as in Britain in 1981 or today.
Only a year before Hitler seized power, there was already an intense struggle between the
forces of revolution and counter-revolution. Because of the failure of the working class to
carry through a successful revolution, Germany was ruled by a series of bonapartist regimes
(under chancellors Brüning, von Papen, and von Scheicher), who relied on reactionary
sections of the military and the fascists to smash the workers’ movement.
In the passage from which the “bourgeois cop” sentence is taken, Trotsky is arguing
against the ‘parliamentary cretinism’ of the Social Democratic leaders. They argued that
because the German army was controlled by the president of the German republic, they would
not allow Hitler to come to power. Trotsky, in particular, was arguing against the wishful
thinking that, because the police were originally recruited from among social-democratic
workers, they would prevent the fascists from coming to power: “Consciousness is
determined by environment, even in this instance.” A “worker who becomes a policeman in
the service of the capitalist stats is a bourgeois cop not a worker. Of late years, these
policemen have had to do much more fighting with revolutionary workers than with Nazi
students. Such training does not fail to leave its effects.”
There was a pre-revolutionary situation in Germany, which (apart from the need for a
revolutionary party politically armed with a Marxist programme) posed the need for workers
to arm themselves, to form workers’ militias, to counter the fascist onslaught. It was absolute
cretinism to appeal to the government, the chancellor, etc, to protect the working class against
the fascists.
“I think that Trotsky was right,” says Michael. But it would only be in a world of pure
abstraction that we could ignore the differences between Germany in 1932 and Britain, or for
that matter France, or Germany, etc, today.
There is no question of our material arguing that, if trade union rights were conceded
to the police or the army, it would be sufficient to counter the danger posed by the state to the
workers’ movement: “… it would be fatal to pretend, as the Communist Party leaders and the
reformist left of the Labour Party do, that ‘the democratisation of the state’ will be sufficient
in itself to guarantee the British working class and a Labour government against the fate
which befell their Chilean brothers and sisters”. (The State…, p31)
The state should not remain untouchable, as right-wing Labour leaders have always
argued. “On the contrary, measures to make the state more accountable to the labour
movement must be stepped up. But the limits of such measures must be understood by the
labour movement. The capitalists will never permit their state to be ‘gradually’ taken away
from them. Experience has shown that only a decisive change of society can eliminate the
danger of reaction and allow the ‘democratisation of the state machine’ to be carried through
to a conclusion with the establishment of a new state, controlled and managed by working
people.” (The State…, pp31-32)
The pamphlet gives many examples of episodes of radicalisation of sections of the
police in Britain and elsewhere. In Britain, there were police strikes in 1918 and 1919 during
the post-first world war crisis. Between 1970 and 1977, a series of police pay disputes,
together with the general political climate, brought a radicalisation of some sections of the
police. At the Police Federation conference in 1977, a young Metropolitan constable said:
“We’re no different from other workers. We may wear funny clothes and do society’s dirty
work for them. But we come from the same stock as other workers. (Boos) We have only our
labour power to sell, not capital.” (The State…, p45) This speaker clearly belonged to a small
minority, but the fact that such a class-conscious attitude could be expressed by even one
delegate was significant. Would Michael argue that Marxists should ignore such trends,
regarding the ranks of the police as ‘one reactionary mass’ regardless of actual conditions or
the mood within the police?
During the May events of 1968, the mood of the police (in contrast to the paramilitary
riot police, the CRS) was affected by the mass general strike movement. Representatives of
the police “tacitly let it be known that operations against workers could not only cause a grave
crisis of confidence within their ranks but also the possibility of what would in effect be a
police mutiny”. (Beyond the Limits of the Law, Tom Bowden) The logic of Michael’s
position is that the advanced workers should ignore such developments, and pass over the
possibility of winning sections of the police over to the side of the workers, or at least
neutralising a section of the forces of the state.
In fact, Michael makes no comments on these and other episodes related in the
pamphlet, demonstrating the completely abstract character of his approach to the issue of the
police.
The Communist Manifesto and Marx’s Demands
The problem is that Michael does not understand the Marxist idea of a programme. He is only
really happy with declarations of “the fundamental principles of Marxism”. “The existing
bourgeois state… must be broken up, smashed, and replaced by a new workers’ state.”
Anything less is “confusion, dissimulation, and ultimately betrayal”. Michael criticises all our
immediate demands as part of “a more limited reformist agenda” or “elements of an outright
reformist strategy”.
What is noticeable, however, is that Michael himself nowhere suggests any immediate
demands that might relate to existing consciousness and provide a bridge to revolutionary
aims. Marxists, he says, should not seek popularity or be afraid of being socially ostracised. It
is our “responsibility to maintain the link in the chain of revolutionary continuity by
developing and charting a path towards socialism armed with the distilled lessons of past class
struggles. We must stand firmly on the tradition based upon the historical legacies of Marx,
Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, for if we deviate from the latter then we will inevitably recede into
empiricism and the eternal present.” So how, may we ask Michael, will our party “engage
with, and intersect, the existing consciousness of workers” in order to change it? He offers us
no guidance at all.
An important part of the historical legacy of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, is
the understanding of the role of a programme in providing a bridge between existing
consciousness and revolutionary objectives. In the course of their activity, they drew up
various programmes, some corresponding to relatively quiet periods of class struggle and
some for revolutionary situations. All of them were based on the understanding that mass
consciousness lags behind social reality. In periods of social quiescence, class consciousness,
even of the advanced layers of workers, may develop very slowly. Under the impact of social
crisis and intensified class struggle, it can develop very rapidly. But the ‘subjective factor’,
the involvement of a conscious revolutionary leadership, especially in the form of a mass
revolutionary party, is a vital catalyst in the process. Moreover, a programme which
encapsulates the vital political tasks facing the working class and at the same time engages
with existing conditions and consciousness is an indispensable instrument of intervention for
a revolutionary party. A Marxist programme is not merely a declaration of fundamental
principles. According to circumstances, a programme has to fulfil a variety of theoretical,
programmatic and immediate tasks.
Let’s consider a well-known example. In February 1848, Marx and Engels published
(under the banner of the Communist League) the most famous programme of all, the
Manifesto of the Communist Party, just before the outbreak of the revolutions that swept
Europe in that year (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communistmanifesto/). Clearly, the Manifesto was in many ways a declaration of fundamental principles
and political objectives. It brilliantly sketched out a theoretical analysis of capitalist society
and a perspective for socialist transformation under the leadership of the proletariat. But it
also included a number or democratic, immediate and transitional demands.
“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement
of the immediate aims of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also
represent and take care of the future of that movement.” (Manifesto, Chapter 4) The
Manifesto (Chapter 2) puts forward ten demands, calling for an end to landlordism and
progressive taxation of wealthy property owners; for a national bank with a state monopoly of
credit and the extension of state industries; and for free public transport and education. The
aim of these demands is “to raise the working proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win
the battle of democracy”.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from
the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the
proletariat organised as the ruling class…”
Undoubtedly, the Manifesto sets out fundamental aims, even suggesting some of the
features of a future communist society. When the revolutionary wave broke out, however,
Marx and Engels wrote another programmatic document, published by the Committee of the
Communist League in March 1848. Published as a leaflet and reprinted in many radical
newspapers throughout Germany, the ‘Demands of the Communist Party in Germany’
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm) was at the time much more
widely read than the Manifesto.
The ‘Demands’ constituted an immediate programme, a political weapon for the
intervention of the Communist League in the developing revolutionary movement. The
seventeen demands corresponded to the situation then unfolding, where the relatively weak
German working class was playing a key role in the struggle for a bourgeois-democratic
revolution. The Demands called for the unification of Germany under universal suffrage, and
the universal arming of the people. Demands 6 to 9 were aimed at the abolition of
landlordism. Like the Manifesto, the Demands call for free public transport, and progressive
taxation of the wealthy. Demand 10 is for a state bank to “make it possible to regulate the
credit system in the interests of the people as a whole” and “undermine the dominion of the
big financial magnates”. Point 16 calls for “national workshops”, in effect a transitional
demand that would in practice challenge the basis of capitalism: “The state guarantees a
livelihood to all workers and provides for those who are incapacitated for work.”
Unlike the Manifesto, however, the Demands do not call (apart from the public
ownership of all transport) for the extension of state industries. There is no mention of aiming
“to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class” or of wresting “all capital from the
bourgeoisie” or of centralising “all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of
the proletariat organised as the ruling class…” The aim of the Demands, set out in the
concluding paragraph, is summed up in this way: “It is in the interest of the German
proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants to support these demands with all
possible energy. Only by the realisation of these demands will the millions in Germany, who
have hitherto been exploited by a handful of persons and whom the exploiters would like to
keep in further subjection, win the rights and attain to that power to which they are entitled as
the producers of all wealth.”
The Demands were focused on the immediate task of strengthening the struggle for a
bourgeois-democratic parliamentary republic in Germany, by exerting the maximum workingclass pressure on the radical petit-bourgeois democrats. Despite its class limitations, a
parliamentary republic was the form of government that would provide the most favourable
conditions for the working class to strengthen its forces and struggle for socialism.
Were Marx and Engels, in putting forward a more limited programme in the Demands
than set out in the Manifesto, guilty of dissimulation and pretence? Were they spreading
illusions in bourgeois democracy? Isn’t this the logic of Michael’s position?
But, of course, Marx and Engels were putting forward of programme of demands that
corresponded to the immediate situation of an unfolding revolution and to the consciousness
of the most radical sections of the mass movement. The Demands form an action programme,
a platform for intervention in a mass movement. The Demands are much more limited than
the Communist Manifesto. But this did not mean for a minute that Marx and Engels had
abandoned the ideas of the Manifesto, or postponed fighting for communist aims to the distant
future. They did not have the idea of ‘stages’, later adopted by Stalinist leaders, according to
which the proletariat had to accept the limits of the bourgeois-democratic revolution until it
was completed, and only then proceed to socialist tasks. Nor did they have the position later
adopted by social-democratic leaders (criticised by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme) of
a maximum and minimum programme, independent of each other: a minimum programme of
reforms achievable within the framework of capitalism and a maximum of socialism in the
distant future.
In 1848 the Demands and the Manifesto complemented each other. During the course
of the revolution, Marx and Engels never ceased to criticise the radical bourgeois democrats
from the standpoint of the ideas set out in the Manifesto. They quickly moved from a position
of critical support of the radical bourgeois democrats to a position of remorseless criticism of
their political cowardice and treachery towards the working class and poor peasantry. From
the outbreak of revolution through to the end, they advocated the ideological and
organisational independence of the working class. The German workers, wrote Marx and
Engels, must not be “misled for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic
party into refraining from the independent organisation of the party of the proletariat. Their
battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence!” (Address of the Central Committee to the
Communist League, March 1850)
The working class should not allow the radical bourgeois democrats to consolidate
power solely in the interests of the bourgeoisie, but prepare for the workers to set up their own
revolutionary workers’ governments (in the form of “municipal councils” or “workers’
committees”) alongside and in opposition to bourgeois-democratic governments. (This was
the germ of the theory of permanent revolution later developed by Trotsky on the eve of the
1905 revolution in Russia.) The policies of the Communist League went far beyond anything
in the Demands of March 1848 and were more concrete than those set out in the Manifesto.
Formally, there are many ‘inconsistencies’ between the Manifesto, the Demands, and Marx
and Engels’ statements during 1848-1850. But demands and tactics – the evolving programme
of the League - were developed by Marx and Engels in response to events – not according to
some abstract, logical schema of the kind Michael seems to favour.
A bridge to existing consciousness
The Communist Manifesto and the Demands set out the tasks of the proletariat in a period of
bourgeois revolutions. Trotsky’s ‘Transitional Programme’, written in 1938, sets out the tasks
for the period of the “death agony of capitalism”, with a life and death struggle between
fascism and communism and the approach of a new world war. Like the Manifesto, the
Transitional Programme is based on a concrete, theoretical analysis of the period. It is based
on a perspective.
The programme contains immediate demands, that is, for reforms, democratic rights,
etc. “Indefatigably, [the Fourth International] defends the democratic rights and social
conquests of the workers… within the framework of… [a] revolutionary perspective.” But the
key demands are transitional demands. For example, the demand for a “sliding scale of wages
and hours” (to achieve full employment and a living wage for all workers) could not be fully
implemented within the framework of crisis-ridden capitalism. The demand implies a socialist
society, without spelling it out.
Discussing the Transitional Programme with US comrades, Trotsky commented that
“if we present the whole socialist system it will appear to the average American as utopian, as
something from Europe. We present it [in the form of a sliding scale of wages and hours] as a
solution to this crisis which must assure their right to eat, drink and live in decent apartments.
It is the program of socialism, but in a very popular form.”
A programme is not a compilation of fundamental principles. The essential elements
of a programme for socialist transformation have to be presented in a way that relates to the
actual consciousness of different layers of workers. Trotsky recognised that the way a
programme is presented to workers is very important. “We must combine psychology and
pedagogy, build the bridge to their minds.” Trotsky could never be accused of being afraid of
standing out, when necessary, in defending revolutionary principles, even if it meant being
isolated for a period. But he would never have willingly accepted the ‘social ostracism’ that
Michael appears to welcome.
“… some demands,” commented Trotsky in discussions on the Transitional
Programme, “appear very opportunistic – because they are adapted to the actual mentality of
the workers… other demands appear too revolutionary – because they reflect more the
objective situation than the actual mentality of the workers.”
Moreover, Trotsky pointed out that the Transitional Programme was incomplete: “…
the end of the programme is not complete, because we don’t speak here about the social
revolution, about the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist society
into the dictatorship [of the proletariat], the dictatorship into the socialist society. This brings
the reader only to the doorstep. It is a programme for action from today until the beginning of
the socialist revolution. And from the practical point of view what is now most important is
how can we guide the different strata of the proletariat in the direction of the socialist
revolution.”
In other words, it stops short of what Michael advocates, a programme for smashing
the bourgeois state and the establishment of a workers’ state, a programme for an uprising and
seizure of power. To have satisfied Michael, the Transitional Programme would have had to
incorporate a new, updated version of Lenin’s April Theses (The Tasks of the Proletariat in
the Present Revolution – http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm).
Produced as the Russian revolution moved from its bourgeois phase to a “second stage, which
must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”, the
Theses called for the seizure of power by the soviets of workers and peasants, the formation
of a workers’ republic, and control by the soviets of social production and distribution.
Clearly, the Transitional Programme of 1938 was written when there was a prerevolutionary situation in a number of key capitalist countries, not in the middle of a
deepening revolution. But by stopping short of the question of seizing power, ‘leaving it till
later’, was Trotsky not falling into “confusion” and “dissimulation”? That is the logic of
Michael’s method of argument.
Michael says he recognises the need for our demands “to engage with, and intersect,
the existing consciousness of workers if we are ever going to change it”. The approach he
advocates, however, is that we should be raising general theoretical formulas, abstract
demands, such as “smash the state”. Nowhere in his critique of our position, which he
represents in an extremely one-sided way (to say the least), does he propose any immediate,
democratic or transitional demands that would “engage with existing consciousness”. He
shows no recognition of the need for a flexible transitional programme that corresponds to
different periods and different situations. If we were to adopt his approach, we would be
doomed to political isolation – in a period that is actually becoming more and more
favourable to winning workers and young people to socialist ideas. Adherence to abstract
formulas might allow individuals or small groups to comment on events – and level
doctrinaire criticisms of those who do engage in struggles. But the method to which Michael
has now unfortunately turned will never provide a bridge between the programme of
revolution and wide layers of workers and young people. If he follows this line, Michael will
certainly be in no danger of becoming a populist – but, more importantly, he will not be an
effective Marxist either.