What sort of federal republic?

Tom Delargy slams the politics of Dave Craig

Given his anarchistic attachment to the unconditional principle of a right to reply, I trust Dave Craig will insist that the Weekly Worker's editor finds space to print this rejoinder to his 2,000 words of lies and smears (April 8 1999).

Comrade Craig views his protégés of the Campaign of a Federal Republic through rose-tinted spectacles. He flatters them when he describes them as firing pea-shooters at the enemy. They do nothing of the sort, Dave. They have been busying themselves scoring own goals while lobbing grenades at their team-mates. Even now that I have 'won' paper membership of Nick Clarke and Mary Ward's 'organisation', they still insist on going their own way, refusing to even discuss a united, coordinated opposition to Scottish separatism within the Scottish Socialist Party.

Just why exactly does comrade Craig turn a blind eye to their lemming-like tactics. And why does he spread lies about me opposing a federal republic of Scotland, England and Wales? Has he not read my document on the subject? A document Mary Ward described as "brilliant"? Comrade Craig knows full well that I support a federal republic. He is just annoyed with me for refusing to recognise that his protégés have bought the franchise for this struggle.

However, by what processes will the federal republic be born? Comrades Clarke and Ward do not have a clue. Either it will be born constitutionally, by the passing of legislation at Westminster, or by means of a revolutionary struggle. Try posing these questions to Mary and Nick, and you will be rewarded with blank expressions. Alan McCombes poses the question as to whether the expropriators can, or should, be expropriated in just one component part of the United Kingdom rather than everywhere at once. How does the Couple for a Federal Republic respond? They propose a workers' trade-in of a Blairite constitutional monarchist version of wage slavery for a Reaganite federal republican version of the same thing! And they fail to appreciate why they are derided as the extreme right wing of the SSP.

Comrade Craig could respond to Alan McCombes by making several points. He could explain that wholesale nationalisation does not put an end to exploitative class relations. But Mary and Nick cannot. The latest recruits to the Revolutionary Democratic Group concur with Alan that the former east European Stalinist monstrosities were some variety of socialism!

Comrade Craig could expose the fact that a large number of the SSP membership are 100% committed to the mixed economy. Their commitment to the expropriation of the expropriators has more in common with John Smith or Eduard Bernstein than with Karl Marx. The SSP Charter for Socialist Change is, for them, no more than our clause four or Erfurt Programme. Mary and Nick are presented with an open goal, but they chose instead to run in the opposite direction.

Dave could expose the error in the Stalinist concept of abolishing class divisions, abolishing the division between mental and manual labour, creating a situation where every cook will govern, abolishing the wages system (even implementing the SSP's left-reformist programme) by taking control of the forces of production in one infinitesimal fragment of the global economy. Dave could do this, but his protégés cannot. You see, Dave, they believe you can have socialism in an independent Britain. Even though Britain might be three countries rather than one, an independent socialist Britain is every bit as much a Stalinist utopia as anything dreamt up by Alan McCombes.

These are just a few of the open goals left for us by Alan McCombes. Why did the Couple for a Federal Republic refuse to put the ball in the back of the net? In my opinion it is because they take the permanence of capitalism as a given. It is as eternal and immovable for them as it is for Tony Blair. I hold out precious little hope that, by my completely inadequate powers of persuasion, I can teach Mary and Nick that workers' power and the expropriation of the expropriators is on the historical agenda in an advanced capitalist country like Britain. I hold out no hope of being able to teach them anything. Exactly the same goes for Comrade Craig.

Comrade Craig failed to even mention the question I posed at the Glasgow Marxist Forum on the federal republic in his Weekly Worker article. Why? Clearly he does not have a firm enough grasp of Marxism to be capable of offering a considered response. Perhaps Jack Conrad can come to his assistance. You see, the question I pose is not just troublesome for the Revolutionary Democratic Group. Their Revolutionary Democratic Communist Tendency partners are no less in need of tackling it. Here it is, Jack: what is revolutionary democracy?

Under revolutionary democracy, who is the ruling class? It cannot be the working class. Otherwise, there would be no sense in positing it as a separate stage prior to workers' power. As far as Mary and Nick are concerned, revolutionary democracy is an above-class democracy, an abstract democracy, a pure democracy. Comrade Craig would appear to be of the same opinion. By adopting this position, they are displaying the most remarkable ignorance of Marxism.

To demonstrate this, I quoted two short passages from Lenin's The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky: "It is natural for a liberal to speak of 'democracy' in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: 'for what class?' ... 'Pure democracy' is the mendacious phrase of the liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy ... Kautsky takes from Marxism what is acceptable to the liberals, to the bourgeoisie (the criticism of the Middle Ages, and the progressive historical role of capitalism in general and of capitalist democracy in particular) and discards, passes over in silence, glosses over all that in Marxism which is unacceptable to the bourgeoisie (the revolutionary violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie for the latter's destruction). That is why Kautsky, by virtue of his objective position and irrespective of what his subjective convictions may be, inevitably proves a lackey of the bourgeoisie."

Mary and Nick's response to these quotations could not have been more predictable. They resorted to their patented ostrich impression, desperately hoping no one noticed that, once again, they had no answers. Perhaps I can be of some assistance. Not to any part of the RDG (they clearly do not deserve to be given the time of day), but to the CPGB. Despite several, quite serious, criticisms I have of this organisation, there is far too much there that is positive for me to wash my hands of them. Patronising though this might sound, when I come across talented revolutionary socialists making serious errors (or what I take to be errors), I see it as my duty to try to shift them onto the right path (or to give them an opportunity to convince me that I am the one making the mistake).

If revolutionary democracy as a stage prior to workers' power means anything at all, it must be an oblique reference to dual power. In other words, the 'regime' which extended between the fall of the tsarist autocracy and the Bolshevik revolution. Mary, Nick and Dave do not have the slightest idea what it means. Is it dual power? If it is, then please remember that the only instance of dual power which had a positive resolution (Russia in 1917) lasted less than eight months. Dual power is no more than a brief interlude, the ever so fragile interregnum between the collapse of a stable ruling class power and either its return to the helm or to its revolutionary replacement. Dual power is an expression of fact that the old ruling class can no longer rule (at least not in the old way), and the unwillingness of the exploited classes to let them rule in the old way.

In both the Russian and the German revolutions, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky were united in condemning those, such as the leaders of the USPD, Hilferding and Kautsky, and the 'old Bolsheviks', Zinoviev and Kamenev, who proposed transforming dual power (the coexistence of workers' councils alongside a bourgeois government) into a constitutionally stable entity. This centrist project was, and remains, an objectively counterrevolutionary project.

Dual power can be no more than the terrain on which Leninists do battle with social democrats, Stalinists, anarchists and centrists for winning the hearts and minds of the working masses - the final battle for hegemony. Our task, should we chose to accept it (not that we are given much of a choice), is to win over the majority of workers to the pressing need to centralise the workers' councils and to smash to pieces every last remnant of the old state power. While we do this, the capitalist class, primarily via its agents (conscious or not) in the workers' movement, perform their allotted role of sowing confusion. They will stop at nothing to undermine the Leninists in the eyes of the workers, distracting our class from its historic mission for long enough for the old ruling class to regroup and use their paramilitary hired thugs, as well as the police and loyal regiments, to smash the workers' councils, the workers' militias, the factory committees.

Indeed, it is invariably the case that the pre-revolutionary workers' organisations - trade unions and social democratic parties (not to mention revolutionary parties) - are threatened with extinction. Extreme authoritarianism, often unadulterated fascism, is the price our class has to pay for any failure to resolve the contradictions of dual power positively - and we are given only a matter of months in which to do this.

It is a measure of Lenin's genius that although he and his party entered the 1917 revolution armed with a completely inadequate programme, it took him no time at all to see the necessity of embracing Trotsky's, and it took him only a few weeks before winning the majority of his party. Lenin and Trotsky were never in any doubt as to which class would lead the revolution. What Lenin did fail to see until after February 1917 was that a tiny minority of the Russian population, the working class, could take state power and, backed by the immense peasantry (a non-socialistic, rural petty-bourgeois class), retain it for long enough to be rescued by a victorious European working class, whose revolution the Russian Revolution could help precipitate.

Lenin was indeed slower than Trotsky in seeing this potential in backward Russia. But never for one second was he in any doubt that the revolution in Britain (a country where the working class formed the overwhelming majority) would put the working class in the driving seat. The working class in power in Britain (as in Russia) would not be content with stopping with the overthrow of the monarchy and an unelected second chamber. These would go. Of course they would. Their overthrow would, however, represent not the pinnacle of the revolutionary movement, but some of the least important aspects of it.

Consider the German revolution of 1918. The monarchy was brought crashing down, and a republic proclaimed. But that workers' revolution has always been assessed by Leninists as a defeat, not a success. The toppling of the monarchy was a very poor consolation prize, not in any sense a good return on the thousands of revolutionary workers who were butchered in the civil war by the SPD-led Frei Korps. As Lenin wrote in the Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky, all bourgeois republican states, even the most democratic, are no more than a machine for oppressing the workers. Only liberals, not Marxists, see them as anything more than this.

Because comrade Craig bows down before the bourgeois (rather than a workers') republic, any similarity between him and a Marxist is purely coincidental. His Kautskyism is distinguished from Ted Grant's only in being of the more degenerate type. Grant's Kautskyism was of the pre-1914 variety. It was sufficiently similar to Marxism (at least on the surface) that it even had Lenin fooled. Craig's Kautskyism is altogether different. His is the post-1918 variety of pure unadulterated liberalism.

What is remarkable (and, to be frank, quite sickening) is that Leninist critics of the bourgeois republic are characterised by Craig as themselves liberals. Most odd. For refusing to prostrate himself before the bourgeois republican state, to become its boot-licker, à la comrade Craig, Sandy McBurney is damned as a liberal supporter of the monarchy.

Comrade Craig, the man who wants to strengthen Scargill's dictatorship inside the Stalinist Labour Party. The man who wants to stop SLP dissidents joining the Socialist Alliances. The man who dismisses the joint platform of the SA in London as in no sense preferable to that of William Hague. The man whose only public criticism of Mary and Nick was their decision to vote for the motion at the SSA recall conference which committed the party to build links with socialist organisations throughout the UK, Europe and the rest of the world (a motion which has forced the executive to respond positively to the appeal of the London Socialist Alliance, and others, to offer their support).

Do we take it, comrade Craig, that you will be joining the anarcho-syndicalist section of the SWP that wants to offer tacit support to the Stalinist Labour Party? Will you refuse to back the CPGB's SA partners? Might you even refuse to back the CPGB? Who knows what goes on in that fevered brain of yours?