Weekly Worker 129 Thursday February 8 1996
Letters
Communist advance
I think that what David Craig and I have been saying has more in common than it at first appeared. Now that he has made his views on economic matters clearer, it seems we are both agreed that the establishment of state capitalism is a necessary progressive step on the way to communism.
This is good. If people from the Trotskyist and more orthodox communist traditions can agree on this as a first step, then we can leave the question of when it is possible to advance more directly communist measures until the issue arises. Let us not split until it becomes a practical issue. We are also agreed that the struggle for democracy has to be at the centre of communist strategy. Where we differ is on what this actually means.
The RDG have a stages theory of revolution: first overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic. In the context of this, workers’ councils will arise. The RDG label this the dual power republic. They will then displace the weak bourgeois executive leading to the establishment of a workers’ dictatorship.
Speaking of the great French Revolution, Marx remarked that past history hung like a dead weight on the minds of the living. The same could be said of 1917. The RDG strategy is so familiar because it is a direct transposition of the Russian revolution’s stages onto Britain. The reasoning presumably being: Russia was a monarchy; so too is Britain. Thus we can relive Russian history. As soon as one poses the question starkly its absurdity is evident.
Revolution, unlike constitutional reform, destroys the state power of one class and establishes that of another. Russia could have a two-stage revolution because, prior to February 1917, the bourgeoisie had not yet come to power. In Britain, the bourgeois revolution occurred more than 300 years ago. With Covenant and Cromwell, Scots and English have had their ‘national revolutions’. The king has been under capital’s thumb since 1688.
Converting our bourgeois monarchy to a bourgeois republic is no revolution. Charles III is not going to emulate his namesake and raise the Standard Royal at York. Quietly into retirement is more his line. When Australia, our constitutional clone, declares for a republic in the near future, none but bourgeois demagogues will call it revolution. Its function, as with all bourgeois republicanism, shall be to buttress the legitimacy and authority of the state. Communists must not lend weight to this. Don’t reinforce the ideology of bourgeois republicanism. From Washington to Paris to Berlin, republicanism is the face and faith of the extreme right. The Republic, the perfect form of class rule:
1) dresses the rule of property as the rule of the people more plausibly than is possible in a monarchy;
2) in practice subordinates the sovereignty of people to that of parliament, and that in turn, to the sovereignty of law. A written constitution, guaranteeing life, liberty and the pursuit of property, eternalises civil society, and its child, capital. Learn the lesson of the Italian CP. The enthusiastic embrace of the new Italian republic by its then leader Togliatti committed the party to 40 years of weighty impotence.
If my views appear at once sinister and conservative, it may be because their expression is brief and negative. I am not so naive as to think that immediate advocacy of a workers’ dictatorship will win friends and influence people. David is right: we should advocate a democratic revolution. But what does this mean. Does it mean abolishing the king and the House of Lords?
No. This is entirely the wrong way to pose things, as in so doing one by implicit contrast asserts the higher legitimacy of the House of Commons. We should be saying that the Commons is as much an oligarchy as the Lords: elections as much an aristocratic institution, in the original sense of the word (rule by the aristoi - our betters), as the hereditary principle. Elections are a filter for excluding the masses, the poor, women, people of colour, those without money or a law degree, etc from the exercise of power. They are more subtle, more devious, but in the long run just as effective.
Similarly, replacing a king with a president, does not abolish monarchy (literally rule by one person). Our monarch is not the queen but a prime minister. Instead we should be advocating no head of state and direct popular rule. Given the current respect and affection with which the political class is held, this should not be such a lonely furrow. Nor is it such a new demand. Even the derided Erfurt programme of the SPD went a long way towards this:
“Direct legislation by the people through the right of initiative and referendum. Self-determination and self-administration of the people in Reich, state, province and parish. Election of all officials by the people, responsibility and answerability of the same. Annual voting of taxes.”
The great point here is the replacement of parliament by direct popular legislation. What is meant by self-adminsistration, a phrase apparently inserted at Engels’ suggestion, is not entirely clear. A conservative interpretation would be in terms of the election of officials. Looking at this is the light of a century of experience of bourgeois elections, I would say that they placed too much faith in the election of officials. Many US states have provision for the election and recall of officials without a noticeable benefit to the working class.
Dave raised the specific issue of the election of judges. Is this an advance or not? I would say it makes no essential difference. Elected judges, being prominent professional lawyers, are still drawn from the same wealthy social class as appointed ones.
But why have judges? They are the quintessential oligarchic institution. We have the jury, the one relic of primitive democracy in our constitution. Better to demand the abolition of the judiciary and the sovereignty of the jury. Similarly, instead of demanding the quite impractical right to elect all of the members of the hundreds of quangos that constitute most of the state administration, we should demand that these be replaced by juries too.
This kind of programme is to the left of the republicanism of the RDG, but it still does not amount to an overt workers’ dictatorship. It would amount to the most unlimited and consistent democracy. As such it would create the political form under which a peaceful transition to socialism would be possible. But whether a direct democracy could itself be established by pacifist means is more dubious.
Nor is it plausible that such a revolution could, in Europe, be national, as the RDG supposes, since with the advance of the European Union the state to be destroyed and the parliament to be replaced will soon be that in Strasbourg. But to counterpose a ‘national democratic’ revolution to the European Union would be transparently reactionary. What we need is a European democratic revolution that sweeps away the discredited political classes, monarchies and republics of today.
Paul Cockshott
Glasgow
Sense of relief
After reading the signed letters by departing New Socialist tendency IS members in Canada, I felt a sense of relief: something has finally happened to breathe some new air into the dry winter air of the Canadian left.
The organisation I belong to, Socialist Challenge (United Secretariat of the Fourth International section in Canada), has had many criticisms of the IS in the past. Both of our organisations have had disagreements within our own ranks. The difference, I feel, is that SC, although it is smaller, more heterogeneous, and, admittedly, more disorganised, has spent the last few years rethinking, along with the USec majority, the tactics that have led to so many failures for revolutionary socialists.
Most of these failures have been causedby the alienation many Trotskyists have been forced into over the years. The intervention in mass movements has often been unsuccessful because Trotskyists have often gone into those movements with a single-minded, destructive agenda: recruit, recruit, recruit. The mechanical application of the Trotskyist formula by various grouplets has often led to fundamental problems of organisation.
The IS tendency has been a victim of this failure of perspective, as has my own tendency. What is encouraging is that there are now groups of socialists who are willing to lay claim to a new notion of organisation, which I see the New Socialist tendency as pushing towards. This notion accepts a new ethos “regroupment”, which does not necessarily mean the advocating of fusions at all costs, but reflects more respect for difference and an overall acceptance of the idea that, while we may disagree on certain theoretical issues, it is entirely possible that we may remain unified in action around a workable programme.
I look forward to working with the New Socialist tendency, whether or not we agree completely with everything they say or not, because of what seems to me to be an openness on their part to a real dialogue with the rest of the left over issues which the IS has too long kept shaded over with dogma and regurgitated slogans.
Ryan Daum
Canada
Dedicated revolutionary
Ellis Hillman, who joined the Revolutionary Communist Party as a teenager during the war, has died.
The RCP was a critical section of the Fourth International, later to explode. From its fragments were created the three historic British Trotskyist branches led by Cliff, Healy and Grant. Ellis was one of the few British Trotskyists that was a member of all of them at different times.
Initially he supported Cliff’s state capitalist group, but he returned to Trotsky’s conception of the degenerated workers’ state and the necessity to defend the USSR. He joined Healy’s International Committee as a leading figure and he was an author of several of its documents. When Healy launched his new party in an ultra-left, sectarian manner he broke with him. Later he was one of the founders of Militant. At the end of the 1960s he broke with all of the groups and became a Labour Party activist. He was member of the Greater London Council and later, in 1994-95, he was elected mayor of Thatcher’s Barnet constituency. He was the first self-claimed communist installed in its town hall.
He was a man with extraordinary talents and capacity to make friends everywhere, especially in the poorest strata. He combined his socialist activities with being leading member of the topological, the secular, the Lewis Carroll and the Flat Earth societies. He was very active in Revolutionary History, writing historical documents. He didn’t agree with the stalinophobics that capitulated to imperialism. He rejected defence of the pro-imperialist muslim Bosnian regime and support for Yeltsin in his anti-communist coup d’état in 1991. He thought that the workers’ states were replaced by new bourgeois states.
Before he died he visited South America and stayed with the comrades from Poder Obrero. He was completely disgusted at the way in which the LRCI treated like colonies its sections in the ‘semi-colonial’ world. He agreed with the platform of all the Latin American members of the LRCI and he started to work with them. Ellis was not a Bolshevik militant. He died as an independent and honest communist Trotskyist who made many mistakes in his life, but he will always be remembered by his comrades and friends as a man with an incredible honesty, courage, dedication and humanity.
We send our sympathies to Louise, Elli and the rest of his family and comrades.
José Villa
South London
CPUK?
It was heartening to read of the developments in Scotland (‘Reform or revolution’ Weekly Worker 128). I support the call for the building of a united revolutionary party organised to challenge the state.
However, I don’t agree with the formulation in that article: a revolutionary party “organised on an all-Britain basis to challenge the all-Britain state”.
My understanding is that the state comprises the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Therefore we need an all-UK party to challenge the UK state rather than a party of Great Britain.
Perhaps the editor could clarify the CPGB position.
Jane Berryman
South London
